'The most moving speech'

This article by Alisa Tantraphol appeared in the June 20 Mercury News.

As a grant writer for the Santa Clara County Office of Education, I’ve been working a lot with our alternative schools program. And I find myself trying to tell the stories of students whose experiences in school and in life have very little in common with any of mine.

I was struck by this when I went out to conduct a focus group at one of our alternative schools in San Jose, just 15 miles from where I graduated high school a decade ago. It might as well have been a world apart. One parent spoke of not buying food because she had to make sure she could pay her son’s cell phone bill; because she worked two jobs, calling him was the only way she could be sure that he had made it home safely, crossing five gang territories on his walk back from school.

I had this story in mind as I attended the Alternative Schools graduation ceremony on Tuesday. As I looked around the auditorium at the Cathedral of Faith, the faces seemed familiar…the proud faces of families with cameras in hand, the bored faces of siblings dragged along, and the happy faces of graduates who looked like so many of the students I went to school with. If you took away the sign that said “Alternative Schools,” I thought, it would be virtually identical to thousands of other graduation ceremonies that take place across this county every spring.

Except that it wasn’t. At my high school, Westmont, the valedictorian traditionally gave a commencement address. But because there were 13 students in my graduating class who had over a 4.0 G.P.A., the administration decided not to choose a valedictorian. Instead, the speaker was selected by lottery. On graduation day, he gave a very nice speech about going to U.C. Berkeley, a proxy for the bright futures that lay ahead for so many in our class.

At the Alternative Schools ceremony on Tuesday, there was no mention of a valedictorian. There was no word of G.P.A.s or academic records. The focus was not on the future—although some of the speakers spoke about doors their high school diplomas would open for them. The focus was on a true celebration of the present: the rather phenomenal fact that 53 students had defied the odds, gotten back on track, and were graduating.

The program featured three student speakers. The first admitted that she used to ditch school all the time, because it was easy to do at a high school with thousands of other students. After landing in juvenile hall, she applied to the Alternative Placement Academy, an alternative school program that runs on an 8 a.m.–5 p.m. daily schedule. There was no way to fall through the cracks in that structured environment, and her diploma was proof that it’s never too late for a second chance.

The second speaker strutted up to the stage…and almost immediately lost his composure. Between tears, he was finally able to convey that he was simply overwhelmed. He never thought he would make it to graduation day. Not even the day before did he think he would make it to this day. The profundity of his achievement did not hit him until he put that microphone in his hand.

It was possibly the most moving speech I have ever heard.

The last speaker spoke of completing her first quarter at Hartnell College, where she is acing her classes. Her counselor had helped her map out a plan to earn her A.A. degree in the next year and a half, after which she intends to transfer to C.S.U. Stanislaus to study criminal justice. To the standing-room-only crowd of over 400, her accomplishments were nothing short of remarkable. In fact, that was true of every graduate in the room.

That was what made the ceremony so poignant. At other schools, high school graduation is a milestone in what is expected to be a much longer journey. While it is a happy occasion, it feels more like a breather than anything of great significance. On Tuesday evening, there was nothing of greater significance than having earned the right to sit on that stage, a graduate of the class of 2008.

Date last updated: June 26, 2008