Front Porch: Graduates’ stories just plain uplifting

There are such good kids out there.

On the first Thursday of June each year The Spokesman-Review runs a special graduation issue featuring area high schools’ graduating seniors, listing their names and including a feature story about one student from each school.

It’s a big enterprise that takes a long time to put together. For the past several years I’ve been one of the writers on the project, and I recently finished my assignments for this year. I’ve been thinking about these young people and the others I’ve met over the years, and I’ve realized some interesting things about them.

They’re all different, of course, but I see some common threads. Getting a high school diploma, not an equivalency, is universally important to all of them. One young man, older than most graduates, returned to an alternative high school after serving jail time for a felony in order to earn his diploma. Why not opt for a GED, I asked? Because it’s not the same, he told me. He wanted to succeed the way you’re supposed to, he said – with a high school diploma, earning the credential the way society meant for it to be earned. He had already taken enough short cuts.

A young woman who – my opinion – deserved a family much better than the one she had, overcame hardships you can’t imagine, including her own attempts to harm herself, and persevered to get that diploma, and promptly marched over to Spokane Community College to help herself get even further ahead in life.

Another young woman was the first in her family to make it through high school – a cause for celebration for her grandparents and an inspiration to her younger siblings. Another girl returned from many months away from school as she fought cancer, came back to catch up and don her cap and gown to walk with her classmates as they collected their diplomas together.

Some of the graduates simply love learning. Others are competitive and just like to excel at whatever they do. But to a person they recognize that success in high school is a steppingstone toward success in life – whether it’s going directly into the workforce or on for more education. It is, as one of them put it to me, “getting your ticket punched so you can get on to the next ride to wherever you want to go.”

So much wisdom from those so young.

Another thing I’ve noticed comes mostly from students who began their lives in other countries. They came to America as immigrants, as refugees or through adoption. If you come from Second or Third World countries, American education is clearly understood as salvation. Two of these students come to mind. One 18-year-old from Africa was adopted five years earlier by a Spokane family and went on to college after graduating from high school. She spoke no English when she got here yet graduated as a member of the National Honor Society. She told me that unless there were learning disabilities to contend with, she couldn’t understand why it is that so many American students fail to do well in school – not necessarily in being high achievers, but even in just passing their courses or attending regularly.

“I don’t see how everyone doesn’t do well,” she said. “All you have to do is apply yourself. It’s all there for you to have, to improve yourself, to succeed.”

Another young man who came to America as a refugee has younger siblings who have become very fond of sitting on the couch with their video games and have forgotten, he said, how limited their opportunities were before. They don’t have the hunger and no longer recognize the differences between where they came from and what’s now possible for them through education, he said. “I just want to shout at them – ‘Read a book!’ ”

And finally, over and over, so many students are interested in giving back to their communities or in serving others. One young man with a 3.9 grade point average and scholarships waiting for him elected to enter the military because he felt called to serve his country. Several others felt blessed by God to be able to achieve and wish to serve others, either through religious calling or through organizations with charitable intent.

It’s easy to get disheartened about behaviors and misdeeds of young people. But all I have to do is pull up in my mind the faces and energies of any one of the young people I’ve met over the years – and I am hopeful. They are truly such good kids. They are the best of us.