Alex Michaud awards Isaiah Vilardo with the Leland and Bessie Speed Scholarship Plaque.
E ach Year, a Highlands School thaway HomeServices Meadows Mountain Realty to a deserving local student prepar - ing to enter the workforce in the housing industry. This year, that student is Isaiah Vilardo, a 2026 graduate of Highlands School who is continuing his education at trade school to study welding. It is a fitting path for a scholarship con - nected to housing. Welding is work of craft, discipline, and precision. It strengthens what is being built, supports what endures, and plays a quiet but essential role in the places where people live, gather, and make their lives. graduate is awarded the Leland and Bessie Speed Scholarship , a $5,000 gift from Berkshire Ha - The scholarship also carries forward the names of Leland and Bessie Speed, who made consistent efforts to invest their time and energy into this community through our youth. In that way, the award is both remembrance and continuation. It honors the past not by looking backward, but by
helping a student move forward. As Tricia Cox, Vice President and Broker-in- Charge, has shared: “Being part of this community means more than selling real estate.” “ It means helping local students build a fu - ture in the mountains that shaped them. Isaiah’s story also reflects something fami - lies often discover when they begin looking more closely at life on the Plateau. Highlands School, the public K-12 serving the town of Highlands, offers a scale that feels increas - ingly rare. Its small setting allows for close teacher-student relationships, strong aca - demics, and a sense of daily connection that larger schools often struggle to preserve. In Isaiah Vilardo, in the names of Leland and Bessie Speed, and in the school that helped prepare him, the scholarship becomes a quiet expression of what this community continues to value.
A FUTURE BUILT CLOSE TO HOME
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