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As they tossed their caps into the air, 370 graduating seniors of Celebration High School closed another chapter of their lives. Overlooking the floor of the Silver Spurs Arena, family and friends applauded their congratulations and approval. The traditional graduation ceremony capped a three-day series of events, beginning with an awards dinner and convocation on May 27 at the high school campus. To the enthusiastic cheers of their fellow students, the seniors were singled out for recognition by faculty, parents, friends, and community groups.
Among the presenters was mathematics teacher Bruce Gillett who led the awarding of the gold National Honor Society cords to an amazing forty-one graduating seniors. Moments later, the stage was lined with ninety students who had a 3.75 or higher grade point average (GPA). As a cresendo to the evening, Sue Bates and Kathy McGaughney announced the selection of the class academic leaders: Eric Mercer as Valedictorian (4.0 unweighted GPA, and 4.83 weighted) and Shana Sullo as Salutatorian (3.98 unweighted GPA, and 4.77 weighted).
Asked whether Eric had required much prodding to do his homework or get good grades, his mother Stacy Mercer responded, “We never had to push him. And he hadn’t been striving to be valedictorian when he started at CHS. He’s just a hard-working student. At the end of his junior year, though, he learned from some other students that he had the highest GPA in the class. His hard work this year helped him maintain that standing.”
The Class of 2009 was the first to have students who began their academic careers as kindergarteners when Celebration school opened in 2006, then as a K-12 facility. The seven seniors with that distinction are Ashlee Hawk, Mitchell Haeuszer, Katie Neff, Kristen Neff, Caneel Palacios, Andrew Rogers, and Alex Sunnarborg.
Two days after the awards ceremony, the students gathered one last time for graduation at the Osceola County Silver Spurs Arena. A bagpipe ensemble led the students into the arena, to the cheers of family and friends; ninety-minutes later the same group led the students, some minus their caps, out the front door and into the next phase of their lives.
For some, that next phase will be a technical trade or a local career. For others, it means ratcheting up their studies to another academic level. Regretfully, we are unable to cover everyone, but the following are a few examples.
Valedictorian Eric Mercer, who also had the highest ACT score in Osceola County, is in for a bit of a climate change as he heads for Duke University, a private research university located in Durham, North Carolina. Eric will be representing Celebration at a highly regarded university. Duke is ranked in the top ten undergraduate schools by US News & World Report, and in a separate study the thirteenth best university in the world in the 2008 THES - QS World University Rankings of universities worldwide.
Sonia Demblewski, who served as a page in the Florida House of Representatives while at CHS, is headed even farther north, to Washington, D.C., and the Catholic University of America, where she will major in biochemistry. Sonia plans to work at Disney’s Wide World of Sports during the summer, but she will take time in August to attend the Young American’s Foundation Conservative Conference at George Washington University, also in Washington.
Matthew Knych will be buying a warm wardrobe as well as his books when he arrives at Kettering University in Flint, Michigan. Kettering, previously affiliated with General Motors and called General Motors Institute, annually graduates the most mechanical engineers of any school in the country. US News and World Report ranks it as one of the best schools without doctoral programs for undergraduate engineering education. All Kettering students are on a co-op program, meaning that they alternate semesters between school and work assignments at a business somewhere in the USA.
Many graduates are staying right here in Florida and will attend one of the state’s many fine colleges and universities. Among them are: Ashlee Hawk, who will be at Florida Atlantic Honors College (Jupiter), Kimberly Bates, who is enrolled at Valencia Community College (Orlando), and Alex Sunnarborg, who is headed for University of Florida (Gainesville).
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