But wait. Is she really a member of the Class of 2007? Should she be included in the "competition" for Valedictorian? Some students at SLHS did not think so. Todays front page Adirondack Daily Enterprise article is titled "Parents say top grad was bullied"
By overloading her class schedule for the past three years, Rebecca Nashett was able to graduate a year early. The policy of the district is that officials must be notified at the beginning of the school year of a student’s intention to graduate early. According to her father, Nashett met with school officials in the second half of her freshman year to discuss condensing a full high school curriculum into three years. But the administration’s policy was to wait until the beginning of the third year to determine if she was eligible to graduate early or not.This hardworking student was treated very unfairly by her fellow students, some of her teachers and by a cowardly school board.
“We were concerned about this kind of thing happening, which is why we thought it would be good if she could get moved into the Class of 2007 earlier,” Lawrence Nashett said Monday.
As it turned out, some students felt frustrated that Rebecca Nashett grabbed the top spot halfway through senior year.
Several seniors approached the Saranac Lake Central School Board early this year, asking for intervention to block a third-year student from being valedictorian. Instead, the board voted in February to do away with the titles of valedictorian and salutatorian in favor of a tiered system like colleges often use to recognize high-achieving graduates.Her father has a few words to say about what happened also.
Friday’s commencement ceremony for the Saranac Lake High School Class of 2007 was a fitting culmination for a year of turmoil and emotional bullying directed against the school’s highest achieving student. This story began more than three years ago when a brilliant eighth-grader decided to overload her high school schedule with heavy-duty academic courses, taking almost no study halls or lunches. Her plan was to condense a full high school curriculum into three years, graduate early and pursue a six-year doctoral program in pharmacy.It appears the school board and the high school principal really dropped the ball on this one. You have a Valedictorian of a graduating class. The student in question was a member of the graduating class whether she was a 3 or 4th year student. If you are going to name a Valedictorian you name the student with the highest cumulative average.
Personally, I agreed with the decision to do away with the Valedictorian and Salutatorian designations. It is much classier, in my opinion, to award degrees magna cum laude, summa cum laude and cum laude as the school board decided. But you can't decide to do that in the middle of a school year. And, if you are going to do that you should wait 2-3 years before you institute the policy so as not to disappoint 1st, 2nd and 3rd year students that are already in the "competition".
Moreover, students that "win" Valedictorian and Salutatorian status are often only tenths of a point apart from each other. Also, the difficulty of the curriculum is not taken into consideration.
In any case, I salute Rebecca Nashett as the Valedictorian of the SLHS Class of 2007. As her father points out she has learned a life lesson.
The valedictorian went to sleep Friday night numb with emptiness. But she studied her lesson first, and it is a sad, black mark against our school system, its administration and our community: Too many people are mean-spirited, small-minded, spiteful and unwilling to recognize hard work, good character and high achievement.There seem to be more and more small-minded people coming out of the woodwork in Saranac Lake.
8 comments:
Bravo SLHS! There's no better way to encourage excellence than to hassle and denigrate someone who shows it!
not that it has anything to do with it, but why did she go thru SLHS in 3 years?
SLHS in 3 years... most likely pressure from her parents seeing as how her brother did the same thing. Supposedly she had been thinking about this since elementary school. I wasn't even thinking about high school when i was that little, let alone graduating early. From my observations, fitting in probably had something to do with it.
and please, this issue was not about degrading excellence. For the majority of the uninformed public, Mr. Nashett's article definitely had the impact that was intended: Rebecca is the injured party and the community is small minded. poor, unappreciated valedictorian. The family apparently likes attention-- well, they certainly have received enough of it. She was the valedictorian, what else do they want??
--class of 2007 graduate
Small-minded comments are allowed, but please use acceptable language.
Anon Grad: 'supposedly,' 'most likely,' 'probably,' 'apparently'... do you have anything concrete to add to this discussion? Peddling rumors and speculation and high school gossip doesn't really help clarify the issue. if 'this issue was not about degrading excellence,' then by all means enlightened us 'uninformed.'
Drama. excuse my lack of definitive language, but let's move on, that's beside the point.
The class wished to be represented by a member of their own class-- the class that had been together for their entire high school career.
Rebecca was not listed in the ranking for the class of 07 until the very beginning of this year, she was also not in a class of 07 homeroom until this year, which means she did not participate in class of 07 activities her entire high school career.
To name a few, these activites included class officer elections, elction of student council representatives, homecoming events, prom.
To have someone be your valedictorian who has not been in your class is like having a stranger give a toast at your sister's wedding, ackward for everyone.
--07grad
Post a Comment