DSHA Class of 2022 Graduation Speaker: Spirit of the Class Ava Jenkins, DSHA '22

I was, however, more than a little nervous about meeting my classmates for the next three years. Would they be nice? Would they like me? Was transferring even worth it?

I don’t remember much from my first few days at DSHA, but I do remember being rather quiet around school. Sorry to have tricked you all, but now you’re stuck listening to me for the next 6 minutes.

In all seriousness, my first few months at DSHA were all I could’ve wished for. Our class showed our school spirit by playing obnoxiously loud music during our 60’s themed Dash-a-Thon. We cheered hard for our classmates at Airband. We were filled with joy and school spirit we just had not yet learned how to fully show our sophomore year, proven by our last place spot in Empress Crown points.

Then COVID hit, and we were all sent home. Our junior year was marred by a feeling of never-ending separation and division. In the physical sense, for 75% of the year, we only saw half of our classmates, masked and six feet apart. We experienced the fatigue of online school and the struggle to focus on our work with how odd our lives had become. There was no homecoming. There was no Airband. There was no winter formal. Even in all of our all-school assemblies, we were split up by class, made to sit on our designated tape marks six feet apart on the cold floor, doing our best to discern the speaker’s words over the harsh echo of the gym.

Our physical separation was only exacerbated by the highly polarizing political atmosphere that consumed all of 2020 and 2021. Our differing beliefs, political or otherwise, drove a wedge in our class that seemed insurmountable. We forged friendships with the like-minded and shunned our perceived opponents. I doubt any class has been more fractured than ours.

And honestly, it should’ve been expected. We were 15 and 16-year-olds living through a pandemic, an election, and worst of all, the ACT.

The start of our senior year provided some much-needed change. We were all finally back together, and school was almost back to the normalcy of freshman and sophomore year. We got to participate in all of our favorite events, like spirit squad for Dash-a-Thon and Airband. Let’s be honest, we all know the best performance was by Senor Hurtado as Gru. We even got a spring formal. School was back, and we were set on completing all of the necessary traditions.

The biggest, most widely loved by everyone — except teachers, of course — are senior pranks. Anyone who knows the class of 2022 would not necessarily describe us as cohesive, good at planning, or good at participating. However, as evidenced by our fantastic and widely loved prank week, we can pull off some surprises.

We started off slow, with “anything but a backpack day,” in which seniors swap their backpacks for more non-traditional items. My favorites were Cece’s shop vac and Megan’s borrowed Sendik’s shopping cart. This one was funny, but definitely more of a prank on us. Each day the pranks ramped up a bit until the grand finale.

On Friday, first-floor teachers were surprised to find the entirety of the first-floor hallway covered in thousands of balloons waist-high. This balloon prank was the culmination of our class bonding. It required most of our class to prep ahead of time, wake up early, discern an early morning entry into the building, work together, and execute a detailed plan. You could say we nailed the Qualities of a DSHA Graduate with this one. I won’t stand here and say that every member of the class banded together to complete this prank, but 100% participation never happens unless you’re Ahnna Faust in any of her classes. By working together and being united, we showed ourselves what is truly possible — mass inconvenience!

For real, though, our senior year has been the climax of high school that it was supposed to be. We are especially appreciative of our good times together because of all the time we spent apart. We were complete, whole, and able to be in each other’s presence.

 

On my last day of high school, back in Mr. Lelinski’s room for my last class ever, I thought about how much we have changed. How had I grown from that first English class three years ago?

Our years at DSHA have shaped us in ways that I cannot articulate in a six-minute speech. I’ll do my best. For such a significant portion of our high school career, we were separated physically. And after a full year, when we returned, while our physical division ended, our ideological and emotional division remained. Instead of feeling thankful to come together, we took it as an opportunity to sow division arguably in a more permanent way.

High school often feels like a place to build strong walls around yourself because, as an institution, it is built for us to leave and move on to the next chapter, often far from everyone we know. But institutions, especially one as special as DSHA, are also created for us to work together to tackle the problems the world throws at us in a safe, supportive environment.

Being together is immensely powerful. Working together is incredibly powerful. Learning together is a gift that this group will never have again with each other.

Half of our high school career was an astonishingly difficult time, and it was easy to compartmentalize by looking forward to all the rest of our lives will offer beyond DSHA. I know focusing on that got me through COVID, and I know it fostered a sense of flippancy about the course of our time together. But I also know that something changed within our class in our last quarter of high school.

We began to reflect on our time and realize that there were opportunities we hadn’t yet taken advantage of that aren’t feasible elsewhere. We began to participate, connect, and forge new, deep relationships we would’ve never attempted otherwise. We came together, grew, and bonded in a way no one would’ve expected from our class.

If you told anyone a year ago that the majority of our class would spend hours on end blowing up balloons for the hallway, they’d think you were kidding. But hey, we made everyone late to their first hour class. And we did it together.