Inside Jaylen Brown’s special decision that “changed everything”

Jaylon Mason expected Wednesday to be just another normal day at Dorchester’s Brooke High School.

Then, at a seemingly mundane school assembly, Jaylen Brown walked in through the door.

Stunned, the hundreds of high schoolers at the auditorium went berserk, screaming, jumping out of their seats, completely incapable of containing their excitement as a thrilling reality set in.

One of their favorite athletes, one of their biggest role models, was at their school.

“I saw a couple kids even cry,” Mason told CelticsBlog.

Brown’s visit to Brooke High School was one of five school visits he made on Wednesday. He spent time at Mildred Avenue K-8 in Mattapan, swung by New Mission High School and Lilla and Frederic Pilot Middle School in Dorchester, and hung out at Nathan Hale Elementary School in Roxbury.

The visits came just a few days after Brown told CelticsBlog he was leaning toward spending most of his offseason in Boston for the first time in his Celtics tenure.

“I’m in the community a lot, but I’m leaning toward being even more in the community,” Brown said. “I’m just really trying to touch this community and be around, be available for the city of Boston.”

Just four days later, Brown demonstrated the impact of just a single day of genuine community engagement.

How Jaylen Brown ended up at Brooke High School

In mid-April, Shantae Romain, Brooke High School’s Director of Operations, met Brown at a private evening event at the high school that centered around financial literacy, health, spirituality, and self-mastery.

Brown was one of several guest speakers at the 19Keys event, and Romain realized she had a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to directly make the case for the Celtics superstar to come by and meet her students. Romain was also well-aware that her students would soon be devastated to learn that Brown visited Brooke High during a time when they weren’t present.

“When the kids saw on social media, they were like, ‘Oh my gosh, Jaylen Brown was in our building, and you didn’t tell us,’” Romain told CelticsBlog with a chuckle. “They hated me for that.”

So, without hesitation, she approached Brown at the event and shot her shot.

“I was like, ‘Hey, this is great that you’re here as a guest speaker,’” Romaine said. “But, this is who we are. This is our school community. These are our kids. I would be honored if you could come back and speak to them directly in that capacity.’”

Brown and his team couldn’t make any promises, but the 2024 Finals MVP said he would try to return in the offseason while school was still in session. Romain never expected the visit to actually take place.

Then, last Sunday, when she was cleaning her house, she got an unexpected call from Brown’s team. Brown wanted to come spent time at Brooke High School, just as Romain had suggested a few weeks prior. His only request? To keep everything a surprise from both the students and the staff.

Ahead of the momentous day, Romain and Brown jumped on the phone for a prep call, and the passionate school administrator shared with the Celtics star background information about her school and students.

“The fact that they remembered their word to me, just spoke volumes about who he is a person, who his team are as people,” she said, shouting out Brown’s security guard, Russell, for his role in making the event a reality.

On Wednesday, the special day finally arrived. It’s hard for those in attendance to find the words to describe just how it felt when Brown took the stage.

“It was the most electric, energetic moment in the room,” Romain said. “Just — goosebumps.”

For over an hour, Brown immersed himself amongst the students, sitting with them in the crowd, calling many onto the stage, and spending extra time with various athletes and top academic performers.

“This brought so much joy to students lives,” Romain said. “A celebrity, an NBA champion, an NBA All-Star, a Celtics player, walking through the same halls they walk through — it just doesn’t happen. To most of the students in the room, he’s their idol.”

Romain believes her students earned such an extraordinary opportunity with their unwavering commitment and dedication.

“They’re well-behaved, they’re respectful, they are amazing, educated, talented, intelligent students,” she said. “I’m like, ‘This is why you guys deserve this.’”

After the visit, her inbox was inundated with emails of gratitude from countless students.

“They were like, ‘That just changed my life. That just changed everything. That just made us feel more motivated, and pushed us through this year… they were like, you don’t even know what this just did for us,’” Romaine said. “To me, that’s everything.”

Romain, who is born and raised in Dorchester, said she couldn’t even fathom an event like this taking place when she was in school.

“This doesn’t happen to us,” she said. “This doesn’t happen in Dorchester. This doesn’t happen in inner cities.”

Before Jaylon Mason finished his interview with CelticsBlog, he gave an editorial note for the story: “Give a lot of credit to Shantae Romain. She made this happen.”

The impact of a Celtics superstar making the trip to Dorchester

When Jaylen Brown took the stage, he delievered a unique message for each grade level. He pushed the juniors to take a leadership role ahead of their final year. And, he urged the seniors to embrace the next steps on their journeys — and always remember who they were and where they came from.

“I felt like it really did uplift the school,” Mason said.

Brown also wanted to hear from the students directly, so he brought many onto the stage to formaly introduced themselves, with a simple directive: “Tell me who you are. Tell me about your school.”

The Celtics star gifted signed game-worn sneakers to the school’s two valedictorian and salutatorian candidates, Syriana Etheart and Maryama Ali. The sneakers were from one of his best games of the 2025 playoffs, Game 5 against the Knicks, in which he tallied 26 points, 12 assists, and 8 rebounds en route to a blowout victory.

Shantae Romain

Brown hung out with students, autographing their clothes, taking photos with them, giving them words of wisdom, and instilling them with unwaving self-belief. Mason was wearing a black shirt, so he had Brown sign his arm.

With finals season just a few days away, the motivation was particularly timely, students said.

“He just told us to keep grinding in school, honestly – we could achieve what he could achieve, as long as we put our minds to it,” Mason said. “He told us just to keep working hard and [showed] where hard work will get you.”

For Mason — who loves science, anime, and comic books — the event highlighted that he wasn’t all that different from the Celtics star. The senior said he realized that just like him, Brown was “lowkey a nerd.”

“I realized I could achieve big things too, if I just put some hard work into it,” Mason said.

Mason has his academic plans laid out for the foreseeable future: he’ll be attending Bunker Hill Community College in the fall to study communication, and then he hopes to transfer to UMass Boston, where’ll major in business with the ultimate aspiration of becoming a marketing manager.

Wednesday’s visit further reinforced the importance of sticking to his well-thought-out academic plan.

Brown was initially expected to spend 25 minutes at Brooke High as part of his busy school tour on Wednesday. But, he ended up spending more than an hour, something that’s become a point of pride for students.

“I’m not gonna lie, I feel like he really did like our school the most,” Mason said, explaining he had scrolled through Tik Toks from the various schools Brown visited and come to that conclusion.

Many of the kids have never gotten the chance to attend a Celtics game in person. So, to spend one-on-one time with a player of Brown’s stature was surreal.

Shantae Romain

Things didn’t return to normal the next day at school.

“People couldn’t stop talking about it, I can’t even lie,” Mason said. “It’s the equivalent of, like, sitting on your bed and eating cereal, watching TV, and like, Obama comes in.”

For Mason, the visit also made Brown feel more relatable. While he was already a massive fan of the Celtics All-Star, the visit propelled things to another level.

“Jaylen Brown is a little bit of an underdog,” Mason said. “I like an underdog type of person… he’s just straightforward. I don’t know how to describe it – he feels like someone I could be like, if I really put my mind to it.”

The reality that someone as high-profile as Brown would choose to spend time with them, at their school still didn’t feel real.

“He actually came to Dorchester,” Mason said, seemingly still incredulous. “Jaylen Brown was just showing us he loved our community. Usually, you expect NBA players to be in it for the money. But he’s really in this for the community. So, it really did make me feel really nice. And he said he was gonna come back with a couple more friends next time. I hope he comes back before I graduate, though — I’m trying to see those other couple of friends he’s about to bring.”

Brown has plenty of other plans in the Boston community this summer.

As he does nearly every year, he’s hosting the Bridge program in July, where select Black and Brown youth from the Boston area will attend a multi-day educational initiative at MIT run by Brown’s 7uice foundation.

“Our kid in the city of Boston, Mattapan, Dorchester, Hyde Park — they need this,” Romain said, urging other Celtics players and high-profile Boston figures to take time of their schedules to make these types of visits.

In the meantime, the thousands of students that met Brown on Wednesday will never forget it, his advice etched in their memory forver.

“The trajectory of lives was changed this week,” Romain said.