Marble – Rain did not dour the pride that filled Thursday morning’s graduation at the Oaks Academy.
“You found your way here,” Principal Anne Boring told the graduates. “You made sure to be successful, and that is why you are here. So today we celebrate you.”
The 14 graduates were split up into three ceremonies, mainly because of limited space and parking. However, the small ceremonies allowed Boring to share words from teachers at the school about each of the students:
- Davie Closser “has a unique style and will always set off metal detectors.”
- Hunter Labonte “always wears his leather jacket,” has a big heart and loves to collect action figures.
- Lucas Nicholas has “the biggest loudest truck in the parking lot.”
- Aiden Pendergrass loves to hunt, and once fed the entire staff and student body deer meat.
The ceremonies were also filled with metaphors about persistence and strength, just like the durable oak trees the school is named after. Boring recited a poem about oak trees, describing how a heavy wind threw everything it had at the oak tree, but yet it stood firm.
“Until today I wasn’t sure/Of just how much I could endure/But know I found that thanks to you/I’m stronger than I ever knew,” is how the poem ends.
Dr. Jeana Conley, superintendent of Cherokee County Schools, told the students about how she loved to help free caterpillars from their cocoon so they could become butterflies as a kid, only for her third-grade teacher to tell her the caterpillars need that struggle with the cocoon to help them become strong. She hoped the same could be said for the students as they enter the next chapter in their lives.
“The struggle is actually where the butterfly gets all of its strength,” Conley said. “So that struggle, and what you’ve been through has made you who you are.”