Hartford graduates reflect on helping each other through hard days
| Published: 06-07-2019 9:54 PM |
WHITE RIVER JUNCTION — The smallest class in 50 years graduated from Hartford High School on Friday.
The classmates from Hartford, Hartland, Cornish and Sharon came together in White River Junction four years ago and quickly bonded, Class President Emily Ricker said.
They “used high school as a place to learn how to treat each other,” Ricker said, coming to know what each classmate needed to get through a difficult day.
Despite the way movies such as Mean Girls make high school look, Ricker said she and her classmates learned that a close-knit group of peers “does make it easier on the hard days.”
Hartford Principal Nelson Fogg urged the 91 graduates to use the community connections they’ve built during their high school years to help them weather future challenges.
When they struggle, their community will be there for them, and they can ask for help, he said.
“Everyone enjoys and gets satisfaction in helping others,” Fogg said.
Fogg also encouraged them to accept their own flaws and “become comfortable with the one that looks at you from the mirror.”
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“Each of you is brilliant, talented and fabulous in your own ways,” Fogg said. “Humans are not perfect.”
As the graduates make decisions, about jobs, majors and living arrangements, Superintendent Thomas DeBalsi said he hopes they will reflect on small and big lessons they learned while at Hartford, whether from the classroom, cafeteria or playing field.
“Sometimes it’s not just the big lessons but the little ones that serve as guideposts,” DeBalsi said.
For example, DeBalsi said for him it took a middle school teacher pulling him aside and saying, “You know, Tommy, I think you should run for student council,” to show him that he could be a leader.
“It really did change my life,” he said.
Valedictorian Abayomi Lowe, who Fogg described as a “Renaissance man,” a scholar and an athlete, urged his classmates to be creative and “not let expectations hold you back.”
Lowe said his classmates already had begun to exercise their creativity, not by writing poems or painting, but by bucking the status quo and following their own paths.
“We are a class that isn’t afraid to explore (our) interests,” he said.
One graduate, Thomas Kasten, created a cross country course and used it to host a meet, Lowe said. Another, Salutatorian Jack Duranceau, used his passion for astrophysics to create a resource to teach other students about it. And Jonas Spaulding was not satisfied by courses in biology offered at Hartford or Dartmouth College, so he pursued an internship at an Upper Valley biotechnology laboratory.
“Every single one of us has taken risks,” Lowe said. They’ve “taken strides to do things that haven’t been done before. I’m proud to have been a part of the class of 2019.”
During his remarks, Duranceau, whom Fogg described as adept at tackling big challenges and networking within the school and beyond it, compared himself and his classmates to pigeons, who are skilled navigators and resilient, he said.
“I think we’ve done a good job,” he said.
But, unlike pigeons whose average lifespan is just 18 years, Duranceau said the graduates’ lives are just beginning.
“We are the pigeons of 2019 and now it’s time for us to fly,” he said.
Nora Doyle-Burr can be reached at ndoyleburr@vnews.com or 603-727-3213.
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