Walking into Portland State University’s Viking Pavilion, members of Lake Oswego High School’s class of 2024 looked up at their families and friends as they celebrated the end of high school and received their diplomas on Tuesday, June 11.
Henri Danzelaud, class president, opened the celebration and reflected on one moment from the college application process..
“After filling out the name of my high school as LOHS and pressing ‘Continue,’ bright red letters underlined my response and an auto-generated message appeared: ‘What does ‘LOHS’ stand for?’” said Danzelaud. “For a sliver of a second, before typing in the full name, I thought to myself, ‘What does LOHS stand for?’”
Danzelaud continued that the L stands for love, the O for opportunity, the H for hope and the S for strength, before introducing Principal Kristen Colyer.
“I’m going to encourage you to become an influencer,” said Colyer. “That may surprise you after asking you to do the impossible this year: going cell phone-free during our learning periods. However, my definition of an influencer may be different from yours. My hope is for all of you to influence not through social media messages, but through the profound impacts and ambition that you can have on the world around you.”
The Lake Oswego High School A Cappella Choir sang “The Road Home” by Stephen Paulus and smaller student choirs performed as well.
“We began high school one step behind, stuck behind screens within the confines of four-bedroom walls,” said student speaker Melissa Bachleda. “We each began our paths to education in a million different places with a million different goals. But by some stroke of luck, we get to begin new paths and new journeys here together. I'm proud to say we sit here as once again a community — a community of thinkers, actors, writers, engineers, entrepreneurs and more.”
Bachleda spoke of her classmates' futures, from dreams of Olympic gold to curing cancer.
“We look back fondly on football games, musicals, pig dissections and field trips to the beach,” said student speaker Aria Hoch. “We cringe at our old photos, bad essays, poor clothing choices. We cry; we mourn the wasted moments, wasted time, all that we could have said, what could have been.”
The last speaker before the diplomas were awarded and caps were thrown was math teacher Kerri Michael, who decided to give one final lesson on statistics.
“Since I have your attention and statistics is my thing: Let's do one last inference problem to end your high school career. What is the true proportion of LO graduates that find success in life?” said Michael. “It took me years to figure out what true success meant to me. Others should be done, complete and finished defining what success is for you. We've done our part. I offer you no more tests. No more curves. No more grade cut-offs. If you aim for integrity, thankfulness, kindness, generosity, flexibility and patience, you will find success and our true population proportion would therefore approach one and it would absolutely be statistically significant.”
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