<\/a>Ryan Shattuck delivers one of the two featured student speeches during Juneau-Douglas High School: Yadaa.at Kalé’s commencement ceremony on Sunday. (Mark Sabbatini \/ Juneau Empire)<\/p><\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
Ryan Shattuck, the first of two featured student speakers, started with his own smartphone moment, taking a selfie of himself with the crowd in the backdrop before narrating his classmates through a collective school experience where “we made it through elementary and middle school in one of the scariest decades known to man — the 2010s.” After that, he said, “we were COVID freshmen.”<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t
“We became Crimson Bears without even walking through the door,” he said. “Instead of rushing through our classes like most freshmen do, we instead took our time to open our eyes, sit up in our bed, grab our computers, open our computers and login to our Zoom classes. And then we went back to sleep.”<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t
Then during sophomore year “we are immediately expected to be able to pay attention in class, participate in school activities and show love for a school that we had just set foot in,” Shattuck said. But the arrival and completion of senior year “I think perfectly reflected how we handled situations like the ones we were put in,” including what he said was navigating “one of the hardest college application processes since COVID.”<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t
“There is so much more left to go and much more maturing to do,” he said. “Like gaining self-confidence…learning good decisions from bad decisions, and learning that even though once again we are being thrown into the next stage of our lives not properly prepared we will once again figure it out.”<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t
<\/a>Meadow Stanley delivers one of two student speeches during the graduation ceremony Sunday at Juneau-Douglas High School: Yadaa.at Kalé. (Mark Sabbatini \/ Juneau Empire)<\/p><\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
The other student speaker, Meadow Stanley, noted that “on my first day of high school I wore bright purple pajama pants and a blue tie-dye sweatshirt.”<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t
But despite some first-time glitches with remote learning “from the moment I began at JDHS I felt a kinship with my peers that I can only describe as a familiar camaraderie,” she said. “Each day I get to come back here to this place and learn to grow up with these people.”<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t
“If there’s one thing that the Class of 2024 has taught me is that no matter what circumstances it is the people around you that make your experiences what they are,” she said. “I have been lost, then found, then lost again. I have doubted myself and wondered exactly what this is all for…But the one thing that has always remained true is my peers standing beside me. Through rain or shine the Class of 2024 has remained a constant presence in my life.”<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t