Sam Almo-Milkin: Stopping the “Everyday’s a Holiday” Announcements?
Imagine sitting peacefully in Morning Meeting, getting ready for meditation, preparing mentally for the day ahead, and then getting interrupted by the most distressing bit of news: Sam Almo-Milkin is stopping his daily holiday announcements!? He’s been doing it for two years! The student body of Sequoyah has never felt more shocked. Impossible, surely. But knowing it’s better to confront your worst fears, I spoke with Sam Almo-Milkin ’25, and other Sequoyah peers about the news. To my utmost disappointment, it was in fact, not impossible.
Rachel Youngstrom ’26 spoke with me about her feelings about the shocking revelation. Her initial reaction expressed how many Sequoyah high school students felt after hearing the news: “Oh my gosh, Sam, you’re gonna stop? Why? You’re not even going to graduate next year! Why on earth would you do that?” However, after thinking on it, Youngstrom reflected that it made sense. “Twelfth graders obviously have a lot of stuff going on,” she reasoned, “And it’s important to have someone to carry on your legacy before you graduate, just to make sure that it happens.”
“He’s a busy, busy, busy, busy junior,” added Luca DiMassa ‘27. “He's worried about his future, his college.” But, DiMassa argued stopping the announcements might not actually be beneficial to Almo-Milkin’s future. “What would a college love to see on a resume? Morning Meeting announcer.” DiMassa also voiced disappointment, expressing that Almo-Milkin stepping down would have been fine if he was going out “with a bang,” but he isn’t. Sam Almo-Milkin’s term as Morning Meeting announcer is ending “with a whimper, with a dying halt, with a screech of pain.”
Sam Almo-Milkin offered a different perspective, stating he had been doing the announcements for a long time: “I’ve said all of the daily announcements that there are to say, objectively, [and] there are only 365 days a year.” When asked if he might regret stepping down from the position, Almo-Milkin responded matter-of-factly, “No, no. I will not regret it. I’ve been doing it for at least one cycle. I’ve given some of the same announcements twice.”
There’s no doubt Almo-Milkin is a crowd favorite in Morning Meetings. According to DiMassa, “he gave the facts and no one else was willing to share his hardcore journalism.” His announcements “shed a light [on] the rest of the world surrounding Sequoyah.” But now that this golden period in Morning Meeting’s short history is ending, Sam Almo-Milkin will need to choose a successor. The students I spoke to all had picks in mind, but Almo-Milkin himself said he didn’t have anyone in particular selected. However, he did share a link to a Google Form for applying for the position, and stated that, “in the future, there will be a Google Form sent to the entire student body.” So, as the world keeps turning, the Sequoyah high school community will just have to figure out what a Morning Meeting without Sam Almo-Milkin’s daily announcements will look like.