Andrews – Fifty-one Andrews High School seniors ended one chapter and began the next during commencement at Hugh Hamilton Stadium on Thursday night.
Family and friends packed the home side bleachers at the stadium. The ceremony started at 8 p.m. and was over in 30 minutes.
Among class standouts were Joshua Luis Hernandez-Gomez and Kinleigh Ann Queen, who graduated summa cum laude; Austin James Bristol, Hailey Snow Fonda, Marlee Elizabeth Postell, Dalton Kendal Rose, Haydon John White, Macie Lee Postell and Rylee Caroline Thompson, who graduated magna cum laude; and Graham Addington Burch, Bronson Daniel Ludixen, Anakaren Lopez Medina, Kurtis Aiden Cochran, Joseph Hiro Evans and Gracie Geneva Skeens, who graduated cum laude.
Student Body President Kinleigh Ann Queen was named the outstanding senior girl. Hernandez-Gomez was named outstanding senior boy.
The Class of 2024 was the COVID class, enduring the pandemic throughout their four-year stay at Andrews High.
Hernandez-Gomez, one of three graduating seniors to deliver addresses to the class, said their “high school journey was like no other. The whole world was on pause.”
He thanked his siblings and parents, who immigrated from Mexico just over 20 years ago.
“They came with nothing and managed to give us everything,” Hernandez-Gomez said.
During her remarks, Fonda said COVID-19 caused her class to “lose the essence of an enriching high school experience.”
Yet she said her classmates met the problem head-on, adding, “We weathered the storm and emerged victorious.”
Fonda singled out Andrews High music teacher and choir director Jennifer Farr as an exceptional educator and “beacon of inspiration. She sees potential where others see problems.”
She described her classmates as compassionate and benevolent, never perceiving others as an “outsider, never an odd man out.”
Pop culture references including Kung Foo Panda and Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (the 1971 version) punctuated remarks during the ceremony, which was presided over by outgoing Principal Lance Bristol.
Bristol called for the Class of 2024 to embrace goodness and, like Charlie Bucket in the original Willy Wonka movie, to do the right thing. (Charlie returned a missing Everlasting Gobstopper, a kind of jawbreaker that lasts forever, thus passing a test to become owner of Wonka’s chocolate factory).