Student Council President Ava Nicholson gave the welcome address at the Oak Park-River Forest Class of 2024 commencement ceremony, encouraging her classmates to be proud of their efforts and their journey to the May 26 day.
“You should all be very proud of where you are right now and what you’ve gone through to get to this moment,” she said.
The fieldhouse on the school campus in Oak Park was packed for graduation after rain forced the event inside. It was a venue much smaller than the open-air stadium where it was originally scheduled to be held.
The shift made audience attendance a bit different, with students given three tickets to have guests at the actual ceremony in the fieldhouse and two for seating in the school’s auditorium where a livestream was made available.
High school graduating classes of 2024 everywhere are made up of students who started as freshmen amid the COVID-19 pandemic, with remote learning and social distancing indelible parts of their high school experiences.
Nicholson told her fellow graduates present that day, “you’re the change that will come after this day. Change … is something everyone here today has experienced.”
OPRFHS Principal and Asst. Superintendent Lynda Parker called out a few distinguished students – ones who will be joining the military after graduation – and had them stand as she read where they’re headed and what they plan to do in the future.
Among them was a student headed to West Point Academy. Another is going to the U.S. Naval Academy to pursue ultimately becoming a naval aviator. A third student was lauded for his next move to the U.S. Coast Guard Academy where he will not only play baseball, but pursue a career in clinical psychology.
In his address to the graduating class, Superintendent Gregory Johnson started out by recognizing the family and friends present – at the ceremony and in general – for the students’ big day.
Johnson called their presence a “community effort” and had the graduates offer their supporters a round of applause.
He went on to tell the graduates that the diploma they receive “is an obligation to pay it forward; to pay attention to those who will follow in your footsteps, and challenge them to do so even better than you have done.”
He then called out some of the collective accolades and accomplishments of the graduating class: 42 Scholarship Cup recipients; 97 state qualifiers in 14 different sports; 10 Nation Merit Scholarship finalists; and recipients of a combined $97 million in college scholarships.
“Clearly, this is much to live up to,” Johnson said.
