Thetford
At 6:29 p.m., the school bells rang and members of the soon-to-be senior class of 2017 walked out in pairs, followed by the 42 graduates.
The audience rose as the graduates made their way down the makeshift grass aisle, thrusting out smartphones, tablets and cameras of all shapes and sizes to capture their entrance.
Per tradition, there was no adult speaker: Students guided the ceremony. Humor and friendship were the most common themes, starting with Julio Ignacio Lopez Linehan, who greeted the audience, then addressed his classmates as “my fellow hooligans.” He greeted each by name interjecting nicknames between their first and surnames, such as Leo “The Professor” Chen, Kayley “Can I Go Home Now” Gray, and Charlotte “I Think All of Julio’s Ideas are Stupid” Kitchel Reining, which elicited some of the loudest laughs.
Erin Michelle Bullard, Ria Madeleine Leveret, and Kira Catherine Williams spoke before the flower presentation, where each graduate left the stage to give two flowers to people who influenced their lives. Leveret talked about how she met Bullard during clarinet lessons which they both found challenging, but also where they became great friends. She met Williams during their freshman year when they were required to take care of an electronic baby for a class.
“We broke its neck so many times I’m surprised we didn’t fail,” Leveret said to laughter.
Bullard touched on the importance of friendship in her and the other graduates’ lives. “My friends are my family,” she said.
Kathryn Lee Borst and Tyler James Howard, in a back-and-forth speech full of playful banter, recalled their years in school together which started in elementary school and included exploding orange juice bottles and a class trip to Washington, D.C.
While much of the speech included humor (“We have our whole lives ahead of us. Not the good part. The good part’s over,” Borst joked at one point), it ended on a sentimental note.
“I’m going to miss Thetford Academy, the teachers and the friends I leave behind,” Howard said, adding that everyone at the school has had an influence on the graduates’ lives.
The last student speaker was Finbar James Curtin, the class vice president, who introduced himself as a “classmate, friend and ex-boyfriend,” to roaring laughter. He spoke of lost Founders Day competitions and other small tragedies that befell the class, such as the sophomores taking the seniors’ parking spaces.
“No matter what went wrong, we always find a way to have a good time,” Curtin said.
The Class of 2016, he said, was not diverse just because of their nationalities or where they would attend school next year, but because of their interests. The theater kids were also the athletes. Social groups that would normally be separate were blended together.
“Our students are rarely members of one social group,” Curtin said.
While Curtin came close to ending his speech on a sentimental note — “It’s cliché, but honestly follow your dreams. The great thing about the future is that it’s entirely yours.” — his last words were from the chorus of the Miley Cyrus song Party in the USA.
After members of the class played and sang The Roots song Send Me on My Way, the diplomas were presented as the temperature dropped to 59 degrees, the wind still blowing.
Family and friends rose in the audience, taking out their tablets, smartphones and cameras once again as the graduates marched down the grass aisle to Pomp and Circumstance. When they reached the top of the hill on which Thetford Academy sits, they threw their hats in the air, officially alumni of the school where they spent four years.
Lauren Marie Brush Arseneau, Johnson State College; Kathryn Lee Borst, U.S. Navy; Jesse Brown, Hampshire College; Erin Michelle Bullard, U.S. Army; Taiyla Qyuain Chase, work; Qingyuan Chen, Worcester Polytechnic Institute; Nadia Lake Clement, Dartmouth College; Finbar James Curtin, University of Virginia; George Lyman Essex, University of Vermont; Galen Larkin Ferris, Norwich University; Taylor Lynn Gravlin, Lyndon State College; Kayley Marie Gray, Lyndon State; Julian Christopher Greene, Norwich University; Tyler James Howard, work; Paige Colby Hudson, Norwich University; Noah Samuel Jacobs-Rebhun, UVM; Jasmine Ann Jamieson, U.S. Coast Guard; Christian Scott Jones, St. Lawrence University; Isabel Mary Jones, Central Vermont Career Center/cosmetology; Isabel Carol Cunneen Kotlowitz, Kenyon College; Edith Ruth Langdell, Parsons School of Design at the New School; Ria Madeleine Leveret, Johnson State; Julio Ignacio Lopez Linehan, UVM; Trevor Dale Litchfield, work; Oliver Austin Munson, Community College of Vermont; Kaleb Hawthorne O’Keefe, Paul Smith’s College; Christopher Luis Fernando Parenteau, Plymouth State University; Lydia Ellen Porter, work; Charlotte Clement Kitchel Reining, McGill University; Robert Thomas Root, Montana State University; Anna Lillian Siegler, UVM; Nicholas Quinlan Slaughter, gap year/Clark University; Jackson Avery Sweet, Paul Smith’s College; Rachel Yvonne Twerdowsky, UVM; Jennifer Elise Ulz, UVM; Levi Darren Vaughan, Vermont Technical College; Emma Joo-Hee Wells, Mount Holyoke; Kira Catherine Williams, Humboldt State University; Guang Yang, University of San Francisco; Ruize Zhu, University of Wisconsin-Madison.
