EVERETT — As Marysville Getchell High School’s Class of 2015 filed out of Xfinity Arena with their families June 10, the one point many graduates seemed to agree on was that the next classes coming up shouldn’t graduate.
This sage advice was passed on by Marcus Lloyd, who expects to head to North Carolina to play college basketball, and by Jarrett Grande and Fila Rosas, both of whom will be attending Everett Community College in their first steps toward careers in nursing.
Rosas was nearly in tears as she admitted she would miss the “ohana” — the Hawaiian term for extended family — she had built up at MG, while Grande confessed to feeling mixed emotions about his departure from high school.
“I’m really happy, but at the same time, I’m not sure what I’m feeling,” said Grande, whose mother, Melany, recommended that future graduates “keep reaching for the stars.”
Al Bennett, Lloyd’s father, had some stern counsel of his own for high school parents.
“Stay on top of your kids,” Bennett said. “Make sure you know what they’re doing. And remember that saying ‘no’ can be a good thing.”
Whatever the approaches of the students and parents in attendance, they clearly worked for the 52 graduates from the Academy of Construction and Engineering (ACE), 65 from the Bio-Med Academy, 75 from the International School of Communications (ISC) and 73 from the School for the Entrepreneur (SFE).
ACE valedictorian Rami Moussi set the tone for the evening’s remarks when he compared high school to skydiving without a parachute.
“It’s a once-in-a-lifetime experience, and you get to spend it with some great people,” Moussi said.
Moussi asserted that the multitudes of casual acquaintances they’d started out with four years ago had been winnowed down to a smaller number of “quality friends.”
Bio-Med valedictorian Diana Orbeladze asserted that the lessons she and her peers learned about how to make mature decisions were at least as important as the subjects they studied.
“The very process of making choices allows us to eventually wake up one morning and realize we are adults, who are slightly more responsible than we used to be,” Orbeladze said. “The decisions we make prepare us for what the future holds.”
ISC valedictorians Austin Ha and Emily Ekdahl joked that those who were disappointed that high school wasn’t like the movies had been comparing it to the wrong movie.
“It’s like Titanic,” Ekdahl said, “because it’s way too long, and all it does is make you cry in the end.”
They then offered the serious observation that they needed to prepare for a future that they hadn’t even conceived of.
“The truth is, the careers we will have one day are ones that don’t even exist yet,” Ekdahl said. “The scarier truth, the exciting truth, is that we are the ones who will be dreaming up those jobs.”
Ha compared himself and his classmates to toddlers learning to walk, saying, “It’s all about trying something, messing up, learning and adjusting. Why should this change as we get older?”
SFE valedictorian Cristianna Campbell wrapped up the valedictorians’ remarks by leading them in a chorus of “Will the Class of 2015 Please Stand Up,” to the tune of Eminem’s “The Real Slim Shady.”
Ekdahl returned to the podium to add: “The purpose of the transition from childhood to high school was to train us to become refined, organized and respectful members of society. I now believe the purpose of childhood was not to shape who we became, but instead to teach us how to shape who we would become.”
“It’s because of how we learned to take risks and brave the unknown that we became more united as a class than any other,” student reflections speaker Rilee Louangphakdy said. “The SLCs were our islands, and we built the bridges to connect them.”
