Isabelle Harvey’s main goal in life is to make other people happy.

So when she noticed that her class at Chimacum High School didn’t have any fun activities planned for their upcoming senior year, she knew something needed to be done about it.

“We had no ASB for the majority of our junior year,” she said. “I got sick of the fact that no one was doing anything.”
The Associated Student Body is a group of elected students who plan activities and fundraisers for students. When no one planned to run for ASB office their senior year, Harvey and two friends — fellow seniors Lucy Miller and Sadie Wisehart — made a pact: they would run together.

“No one wanted to take it up,” she said. “I didn’t want our senior year to suck. And I wanted the best for my friends.”

Stepping up paid off. When Harvey was elected senior class president, she used her new position to bring back the senior class’s school pride.

“Our class did not have a lot of pride, but we basically started talking about all the things our class has done well,” she said. “We started emphasizing the amazing things we had done and we got a lot of class pride out of that.”

With the ASB, Harvey helped host a class T-shirt design contest, held a popular Halloween haunted house fundraiser, organized a formal winter ball, and got a record amount of senior students to help decorate the walls for homecoming — an annual tradition, and class competition, at Chimacum High School.

Harvey also read the school’s daily announcements over the loudspeaker every day this year.

“In many ways, she was the voice of Chimacum this year,” said principal David Carthum.

A lover of math and science, Harvey plans to study engineering at Western Washington University.

“The practicality of math is so beautiful to me and how you can use it to make beautiful things and combine it with art,” she said.

In her AP art class, Harvey made a portfolio of sculpture work.

“It was amazing how she tied so many of her sculptures to her work in other classes,” said teacher Gary Coyan. “She’d make these small figures based off of things she was reading in her literature class — it was really unique stuff.”

Starting in middle school, Harvey taught herself how to play the harp and also plans to minor in music studies.

“I get to school around 7 in the morning, and one day I walked into the building and there’s Isabelle in our commons playing the harp,” Carthum said.

But as her senior year progressed, Harvey decided she wanted something a little extra for this year’s graduates. That’s when she and the other ASB students came up with the idea to grow their own lilies in the school garden. They worked with horticulture teacher Gregory Reed to grow lilies for the entire graduating class, so each student could hold one while walking across the stage at graduation.

But when March came and schools across the nation shut down, it suddenly became clear that everything Harvey and her fellow ASB members had been planning was not going to happen.

The senior class trip was canceled. Prom was canceled. Even a graduation ceremony was up in the air for a while.

Harvey, like many other students, was stuck at home learning online.

“It’s less work, but it’s harder,” she said. “Sometimes the Zoom meetings are really long. I’m on Zoom for six hours straight some days.”

And being the class president, Harvey had to field questions, concerns and anxieties from all of her fellow students.
“It’s incredibly stressful,” she said. “And really saddening, too, especially when the seniors are asking what graduation is going to look like, what they can do to help and the only answer I have is, ‘I don’t know,’ or, ‘It’s in limbo.’”

But nothing can keep Harvey down for long.

At home, she used her quarantine time for extra time practicing the harp and began crocheting up a storm — she’s currently in the process of making a dress.

Even though she knew some events couldn’t get replaced, she also knew that the lilies her fellow classmates had planted were still growing. 

That’s why, on graduation day, the stage was decorated with lilies. 

And while Harvey has hopes and dreams for her future career, her most important goal is as simple as growing a lily: bringing joy to others.

“I don’t have any aspirations to rule the world or build a giant statue,” she said. “I just want to make people happy and whatever way that is, it will show itself.”