Paper Weight: That Diploma Is A Huge Deal
Don’t underestimate the much-maligned high school diploma.
Sure, it doesn’t take kids as far as it used to, but it’s far from meaningless. Anyone who’s sat through a graduation with sobbing mothers, camera-clutching fathers, stepparents, aunts, uncles, grandparents, godparents, friends and neighbors knows that floppy piece of paper carries a lot of weight.
If a diploma isn’t important, why do graduations attract so many people?
Parents who haven’t attended a single open house, school play or parent/teacher conference in 12 years slip into their Sunday best for graduation and accessorize with video cameras.
We downtown Coeur d’Alene families started lining up at Lake City High’s front doors two hours before last Saturday’s ceremony. The night before at Coeur d’Alene High’s graduation, cars overflowed the school’s parking lots into the church lot across the street.
A shoehorn couldn’t have slipped more people into the crammed gymnasiums.
The ceremony lasted a magical two hours during which all our family grievances, complaints and frustrations were suspended. There was peace and all the giddy happiness that goes with it.
The children whose work habits we’d lamented and attitudes we’d criticized were, for those two magic hours, our flawless models of achievement.
We celebrated accomplishment. We bear-hugged our children and each other. Our kids accepted their diplomas and raised their arms in victory, and we whooped and cheered as if they’d just made the game-winning basket.
Some kids had never experienced such adulation from their families and probably never will again.
No one cared that high school diplomas are tickets to minimum-wage jobs because, for those two hours, they made us so proud. Every family left graduation a little healthier, a little closer.
As if something very meaningful had just happened.
Move the momentum
One playground down, one more to go. Head Start is counting on the same community energy that built the fabulous play paradise in Coeur d’Alene’s City Park last month to drive the Harding Center’s playground project June 21 and 22.
Consider Harding’s project a little sister to the big playground and dig out your hammers and wheelbarrows again. The Harding Center is at 411 N. 15th St. in Coeur d’Alene. Show up anytime between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. and director Doug Fagerness will put you to work.
Education counts
Remember Kendra, the struggling single mother who couldn’t afford summer school for her three children? Each class costs $75 and the Coeur d’Alene School District has no money to pay for the program.
Several families came through for Kendra and for two or three other kids, proving that education still is top priority in some minds. Maybe the EXCEL Foundation will add summer school scholarships to its impressive list of grants and donations …
Good book
If you’re stumped when people ask where to find help for hunger, illness, homelessness, abuse, etc., you need a Community Resource Directory by your telephone book.
The directory lists more than 750 Panhandle agencies and programs that offer help. Yawn if you must, but when you want to help the abused young mother next door, you’ll wish you knew the number to call.
Information and Referral compiles the $15 directory and is nonprofit. Call 667-6400 to order one.
Burn, baby, burn
I know some students who burned an outdated textbook a few days ago to exorcise a rotten class they’d had. How did you celebrate the end of school? ‘Fess up to Cynthia Taggart, “Close to Home,” 608 Northwest Blvd., Suite 200, Coeur d’Alene 83814; FAX to 765-7149; call 765-7128; or e-mail to cynthiat@spokesman.com.
, DataTimes