2020 Grads

CLASS OF 2020 LINCOLN DAILY NEWS JUNE 2020 Page 63 Isabella Wade - Valedictorian speech Mount Pulaski High School Class of 2020 Graduation M y fellow graduates, the class of 2020. Today is the day we close one chapter of our lives and open a new one. Now I don’t know about you, but I have not always been an avid reader. In school, we all knew the teachers that would assign a book and say,” okay we will have tests after these chapters”. Maybe we put the book on the side burner, waiting till the night before to inevitably look up online summaries to prepare for the test. (I mean I’m sure none of us did this, but just go along with me for a moment) What we did not know was even though we may have passed the test, we missed out on the real treasures found in the details. Life is like a book; it’s easy to focus on the big milestones - the first day of school, graduation day, a career, family, whatever our chapters may be; or tempting to jump to the end to see if it’s worth it. But, as Mister Rogers said, “the gifts we treasure most over the years are often small and simple...we all have different gifts, so we all have different ways of saying to the world who we are.” When we think of our high school years, often it’s about the homecoming weeks (which the 2020 class won three years in a row if you didn’t know), the proms, the basketball games with everyone piled into the Ed Buckovich gymnasium sweating in the stands while students scream from the student section - but if you only see high school through those highlights, you miss out on so much. As freshmen, we prepared to secure and enjoy our lifelong memories of the high school highlights ahead of us; little did we know we were in for so much more. Our class is resilient, we have been through thick and thin. We’ve traveled continents together; won and lost together; passed and failed tests together (thank you Anatomy); we laughed together til we cried and cried together til there were no more tears. We shared heartache and pain as we lost some of the people we love most, but became Kinder CONTINUED u