Spraying silly string freely on a balmy and windy day dressed in
a polyester may not be the most enlightened idea ever conceived.
But then again, it’s graduation day.
Spraying silly string freely on a balmy and windy day dressed in a polyester may not be the most enlightened idea ever conceived.
But then again, it’s graduation day.
At the announcement Friday at 5 p.m. that finally they were graduates of Live Oak High School, the rows of dark green Fighting Acorns threw their caps, high-fived and hugged.
“We did it!” was shouted again and again. Their class mantra was “forever young” – Bob Dylan’s original played continuously at the dismissal.
“Tonight, I challenge you ‘dare to be young forever,’ ” retiring Principal Nick Boden said at the ceremony on the football field. “You are a class act all the way around and we are extremely proud of you.”
Greg Wong, one of Live Oak’s salutatorians, had a permanent smile on his face from his walk onto the stage to receive his diploma to posing for photos afterward.
“We know we have a family of acorns here,” Wong said. “We cheered for each other, we pushed each other.”
He said the 251 students in the class of 2010 truly got along and steered clear of cliques – “all of our hard work has paid off,” Wong said, who with a staggering 4.46 GPA will attend UCLA and study bio-chemistry.
Yellow string and posts marked the outline of the audience’s limits to take photos and scream their child’s name and much like the paparazzi at a Hollywood event, parents squeezed in to capture it all on film.
Live Oak’s valedictorian Khanh Bui, who stood alone with a 4.54 – had some final parting words before she moves on to Duke University.
“I’m so excited and so terrified for us,” Bui said. “But we’re graduating from the No. 1 high school in Morgan Hill.”
Clapping and laughter soon followed.
She told a story about a young man named Thomas who failed thousands of times before he invented the light bulb – but Thomas Edison didn’t qualify what he did as “failures” but rather “he found 1,000 things that didn’t work.”
Bui encouraged her class to try and try again because only in failure will you find true success, she advised her peers.
The American flag T-shirt flap that mesmerized national media on Cinco de Mayo this year and disrupted Live Oak’s campus did receive a few moments of attention during the ceremony. The TV news vans that camped outside of their school and a dozen police officers who guarded their gates was later called a “spectacle” and the event was “blown out of proportion” students have said. Superintendent Wes Smith said in his address to the crowd that he was impressed by “the courage and the inspiration over the last half of the year,” at Live Oak.
Mika Matsumoto said in her salutatory speech, “We have learned and witnessed firsthand that the media and world around us can twist situations away from the truth. I implore you to search for the truth and fight for it. One of the best things about our class is the respect and kindness we have for each other.”
Friday night every Live Oak graduate was cloaked in forest green and the signature cap – and the spectacle indeed has dissipated as the last school bell rang. Live Oak students stood as a united front who at the surface had at least one thing in common: Every person had spent 13 years in school to finally say they were high school graduates.
“We were grown from the same tree,” said Thomas Mangano, the senior class president.
Mangano and senior class vice president Nathaniel Gulizia announced the senior class gift to Live Oak – an electronic marquee to replace the aging Live Oak sign in front of the school.
A few families brought blankets to spread out at the far ends of the audience and relaxed on the ground during the hour-and-a-half ceremony. And many mothers and grandmothers could be seen with the remnants of tears in their eyes. “They grow up too fast,” one grandmother said about the oldest of her three grandchildren.
Joining Smith were the Morgan Hill Unified School District board trustees who were on-hand to announce names and hand out diplomas to the eager seniors. The ceremony was even more memorable for two school board trustees, Mike Hickey and Peter Mandel, whose children each graduated Friday night – Trevor Hickey and Emily Mandel.
It was also a family affair for three Live Oak staff members who watched their children graduate as they helped on stage: Tracie Shumate’s daughter Kristen, JoAnne Markowska’s daughter Sophia and English teacher Paula Haaser’s daughter Alexandra.
Haaser began to cry as she managed to get out her daughter’s name into the microphone. “I am especially proud of Alexandra Catherine Haaser,” she said.
From the smallest acorns – the school’s program read – grow the largest oak.
Senior Andrea Reyes-Ortiz, the ASB president, left the class with inspired words from Bob Dylan himself: “May you build a ladder to the stars, and climb on every rung. May you stay forever young.”
