On Sunday, it seemed that all signs on the path around the Falls pointed to Oconto Falls High School, where we congratulated the OFHS Class of 2014.
It was a great day for a graduation. Although the weather was not quite what these graduates might have hoped for, it was a day they had been looking forward to for some time.
It was the fall of 2000 when their proud parents put them on the bus for the first day of 4-year-old kindergarten. Their parents might have recorded that event with a picture or video.
There have been many advances in digital technology since then. No doubt families have many more images added to the collection since the first day they climbed onto that big, yellow bus. We suspect that many more images were added Sunday.
Many of these students have become masters of digital imagery and used that skill in their journey through high school.
Their grandmas and grandpas might have taken a few digital shots, too, but becoming masters of digital imagery is a bit harder for that generation. Sometimes they had to turn to members of this class to learn a few tricks or get things set up.
Education is a hot topic in the media today. One of these topics has to do with the Common Core state standards and whether those standards are sufficiently rigorous. They raise the bar. We have been working on implementing these new standards for a few years, and the seniors have risen to the expectations. Three in the class had a perfect 4.0 grade point. Test results show increasingly higher achievement.
This is a credit to their teachers and to their own efforts to push themselves to ever higher accomplishment in the academics. Sometimes we only give credit to their high school teachers, but many elementary teachers were at the graduation. One kindergarten teacher said these graduates were in the first class she taught.
The academics are important and are easy to measure. But there is much to the quality education these students have experienced. They excelled in leadership positions in student organizations, sparkled under the spotlight in music and drama, brought cheering crowds to their feet watching athletic events, competed nationally in a number of areas, built houses, fabricated a great variety of projects in our shops, and the list goes on and on.
Their class motto is “Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you have imagined.” It suggests the experience is about building dreams and using imagination to create a brighter future. That’s never reported on school report cards, but you can see it in their eyes, their confident walk and the great smiles on their faces.
These past four years, they have created and turned many dreams into reality, some they never could have imagined when their parents watched them step onto that bus back in the fall of 2000.
We hope that pattern will continue after they walked out of the school’s doors. We challenge them to set big dreams and walk confidently with their heads held high as they turn those dreams into reality.
Their motto is a quote from the 19th century American author and philosopher Henry David Thoreau, perhaps a tribute to their love of literature and their senior class adviser, Mrs. Dallmann.
Another philosopher and musician from across the pond, John Lennon, used that theme in the chorus line in his classic, “Imagine:” “You may say I’m a dreamer; But I’m not the only one; I hope someday you’ll join us; And the world will live as one.”
Let us hope that these graduates continue to dream and that we can all join them as they work to live out those dreams and make this a better world.
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