Last
Friday in Macon, and last Thursday in Clarkston and Cave Spring, the air was
electric, as it is at all graduations.
As
ceremonies unfolded at the Georgia Academy for the Blind, the Atlanta Area
School for the Deaf, and the Georgia School for the Deaf, you could feel the
anticipation buzzing through the air. The future is almost physically present,
something with real matter and weight, in a room full of
almost-graduates.
You
don’t need to see the clapping, or hear the undercurrent of noise, to feel it.
Last
week, Georgia’s three state schools graduated a total of 43 students – each of
them a fighter.
Each
room of graduates last week was a room full of overcoming.
At
the Atlanta Area School for the Deaf, a small school off a quiet road in
Clarkston, and at the Georgia School for the Deaf’s green, pastoral campus in
Cave Spring, the ceremonies unfolded not just in words but in moving hands.
Guests who weren’t fluent in sign language listened to speaking interpreters,
but they learned quickly, when it came time to clap, to abandon the typical
smacking of palms for a gentle waving of fingers in the air.
At
the Atlanta Area School for the Deaf, valedictorian Jesus Alberto Ontiveros
urged his classmates to move forward.
“Please,”
he told them. “Do what you dream of.”
Commencement
speaker MeLisa Dennis signed encouragement to the graduates, nudging them
toward all the overcoming ahead.
“When
people tell you that you can’t, because of this or that,” she told them, “you
remember that I told you, you can.”
At
the Georgia School for the Deaf, students donned yellow and green caps,
hand-decorated in paint and glitter: I did it. Thanks, mom and dad.
Commencement
speaker Mike Glenn, a former NBA player and basketball analyst for Fox Sports
South, signed his address. His father was a teacher and coach at GSD and he was
standing, on Thursday, in the gym where he learned to play basketball. As he
left the stage, he bent his middle and ring fingers and extended the others out
– the sign for “love.”
Speaker
after speaker reminded the students not to let their hard work end on the
stage.
“Great
things are expected of you,” State Board of Education member Larry Winter told
them, “because you are a great woman. You are a great man.”
Before
the graduates made their way across it, the school’s DeSign choir filed onstage
and signed the lyrics to Katy Perry’s “Roar,” a moment Principal Leslie Jackson
noted later in the ceremony.
“They
have the eye of the tiger – the GSD Tiger, right?” she said, referencing the
school’s mascot, and her nine graduates. “Today, you have heard them roar.”
On
display at the Georgia Academy for the Blind a day later was the essence of
school as community. It was there in the teachers and principals gently
adjusting graduates’ tassels, in the encouragements to the ceremony’s student speaker, in
the strains of songs sung by the school choir.
“It
is a milestone day,” 2014 Georgia Teacher of the Year Runner-Up David DuBose
said in his commencement address. “It is a day that you’re going to remember
for a very, very long time.”
As
each graduate made their way across the stage, the front rows – the other
graduates – erupted.
“Good
job, buddy!” one student cried as a fellow graduate made his way across the
stage.
There
wasn’t a dry eye in the house.
2014
Georgia School for the Deaf Graduates:
Jerry
De’Angelo Blackmon
Nestor
Armando Cacho Ramirez
Min
Sun Kim
Lee
Khang
Joshua
Louis McTaggart, Valedictorian
Chantel
Maree Owens
Ieshia
Marie Pugh
Edward
Bernard Snipes, Jr.
Cassie
Danielle Worthy
2014
Georgia Academy for the Blind Graduates:
Jakai
Santrell Blackmon
David
Lee Brown
Victoria
DeAnn Durham
Lynsy
Erin Floyd
Alexandria
Shay Gooch
Alexis
Dechele Griffin
Jade
Katherine Keller
Laté
Giresse Lawson
Teenois
Tois Lawson
Darrius
DeAndré Mayes
Canaan
Gray McCormick
Sarah
Leigh Pergola
Michael
Tyrell Ross
Katelin
Brenachele Sinkfield
Mariya
Krasimirova Vasileva
Jonathan
Dustin Williams
Isaac
Malik Wilson
Johnny
DeShone Youngblood, Jr.
2014
Atlanta Area School for the Deaf Graduates:
Crystal
Deyanira Cruz Cabrera
Xylinda
Ona Collins
Xylonda
Rea Collins
Joshua
Thomas Grant
Pierce
Edward-Arien Jackson
Julio
Cesar Marcial Reyes
Marvin
Marquez
Ezequiel
Mixcoatl Zecuatl
Jaquisha
Deshunt’a New
Jesus
Alberto Ontiveros, Valedictorian
Leonard
Peduri
Nathan
Ryan Phillips
Oscar
Alejandro Sanchez Pacheco
Hugo
Humberto Soto Sanchez
Alexander
Francis Valdez
Cecilia
Vega Jimenez
