Echo Dunbar is a perfect exemplar of the qualities that an Enloe student should possess. Between her leadership, drive, curiosity, and willingness to help others around her, Echo embodies all of these traits and more.

Echo has been on the board of Enloe’s Genders and Sexualities Alliance (GSA) since her junior year, serving as a vice president last year and this year as the president. Through this role, she provides a safe space for all of Enloe’s queer students as well as a place for them to learn about their community. Echo herself said, “It’s all about trying to do something that everyone enjoys, something that everyone can engage in … I think it’s really vital that we do a lot of learning.”

This love of learning translates in class as well. Mr. Greer, who taught Echo in AP/IB English Language in her junior year, said, “She’s smart, she has multiple interests, and is really concerned with learning.” In a very grade focused school like Enloe, there are a lot of people who are more concerned with grades than true education, but Echo resists this, putting her emphasis on learning from her classes. “She just is constantly looking for ways to improve herself and has consistently had a dream for her future,” said Echo’s boyfriend, Xander Knight. “[She] has pursued that her whole life and I have a great admiration for [that].” Echo herself notes this love for learning when talking about her IB journey, describing how the difficulty of the program has been both tough and enriching for her. She recommended that those who are truly curious take IB and be there for learning as opposed to just for the community.

The goal of GSA is to create community and acceptance, which is also something that Echo excels at. Those who know her describe her as kind, welcoming, and incredibly accepting of difference. Mr. Greer also noted Echo’s ability to move between groups, saying, “We have subgroups here Enloe and they kind of clique up, but I think Echo can move in and out of many different groups with ease.” This is one of her best qualities since she uses it both as a leader and as a student. The GSA is a club that takes students from all walks of life and tries to give them community, so Echo’s skills as a connector certainly help her.

This quality goes in tandem with her advice for queer students starting at Enloe. That being the age-old phrase, “be yourself and you’ll find a community.” She said, “It’s the teachers’ jobs and the students’ bare minimum to help other people and to be a good community.”

One of Echo’s favorite experiences as GSA president is meeting rising freshmen at flight school. Specifically, she loves to “see the people that are going to succeed me, the people that are going to go to my club in the future and one day run that very same club and one day be seniors, one day be in the same boat, go to college, have careers.” The values that Echo has established in GSA are essential to the Enloe community, so seeing them continue is also an important hope of hers.

Echo’s willingness to help others continues into her activities outside of GSA, as she tends to the flowerbeds around Enloe. In her future, she has said her goal is to be a pediatric psychiatrist, particularly focusing on queer children. Her reasoning for pursuing this is due to the amount of misinformation about the nature of queerness, explaining, “I want to help queer children get the medicine that they need and help LGBT children get what they need to help [with] gender dysphoria … currently there’s a lot of people in the field who are not willing to give out those medications to the people who really need them.”

We at The Eagle’s Eye are confident and hopeful that Echo will succeed in anything she puts her mind to, and we wish her all the best leaving the Nest!