An Emotional Graduation Day for this High School Senior

Meet Nick, a high school senior with every reason to smile

I had just started reading an article in Newsweek about America's top public high schools when Nick strolled into my office, plunked down his backpack, and settled into a chair.

"What are you reading?" he asked, grabbing a handful of M&Ms as he moved his chair next to mine and stared into my computer screen.

This is one of the many reasons I love working at The Forum. Every afternoon, like clockwork, a varied group of teenagers wanders into our office and treats it like a second home - a special, safe place where they can relax, eat snacks, mingle with staff and each other, and work on office computers. Most of these kids are members of our YOUTH Forum who live or go to school near our office in downtown Hartford, though not always. Sometimes they bring friends, and soon these friends bring friends of friends, and one by one, one conversation at a time, we get to know them all.

And just as these kids may benefit from spending time in our office and feeling their worlds expand, I know for a fact that we benefit more.

"So they just came out with a list of the top high schools in America," I tell Nick, trying to subdue any hints of my own skepticism about Newsweek's ranking system. "Can you guess what high schools made the list in Connecticut?"

Nick, a graduating senior at East Hartford High School and a proud member of their award-winning ballroom dancing team, was quiet for a moment, and then said, "No place around here."

In many ways, he was right. Though Connecticut's "top public high school" was located just a few miles away from his own - and, incidentally, right in my own town - for Nick and many others like him, it seemed miles away and completely out of reach.

"How did you get started on the ballroom dancing team?" I asked, decidedly changing the subject but curious, too.

"Well," Nick responded, smiling, "I had been fooling around in Spanish class and my teacher gave me detention. She said I could either show up at detention after school, or meet her at the ballroom dance team practice. I went to the practice and they told me I had good posture, good frame. I've been dancing ever since. We just won the inter-district championship."

"What's your graduation day going to look like?" I continued, eager to learn more about Nick, clearly a shining star in a high school that never even came close to making Newsweek's list of the top 1,500 high schools in America. "What will that day be like for you?"

Nick didn't hesitate. "It'll be emotional," he said, pausing, then adding, "I'll be the first one in my family to graduate high school on time, and the first one in my family to go to college."

He'll do even more than that. Nick will participate in a rigorous 6-week academic summer program designed to help him prepare for college classes. He will live in a dorm during the week and go home on weekends.

"But what about laundry?" I asked, genuinely curious. "And what about ballroom dancing? Will you keep at it?"

Nick just smiled in a way that only Nick can: full of joyful exuberance and youthful charm.

"I'm not sure about the laundry," he said, "but I may just have to start my own ballroom dancing team at college."

You may have to do that, Nick. And Nick? When you do, it'll be music to my ears.

Commencement Address Wisdom: Not Just for Kids

If "youth is wasted on the young," as George Bernard Shaw once observed, then it seems fitting that commencement speeches - and particularly those with unusually perceptive insights, wit, and wisdom - are wasted on those eager to commence.

I don't know about you, but I remember virtually nothing about the commencement addresses I've endured through the years...no pithy quotes, no resonant nuggets of wisdom. I'm sure there were quotes and nuggets aplenty, but back then, I simply couldn't hear them. I was too busy, er, commencing.

Now that I've slowed my pace enough to listen and actually hear the insights and advice offered by this year's crop of commencement speakers, I am humbled. Inspired. Challenged.

I hope you will be, too. Here are a few highlights for the Class of 2009 - and for us all.

"The world is in need of bright minds. Individuals who seek to spread peace and prosperity by the way they conduct themselves and the value they place on the lives of others and on life itself. These people, by way of their concern and awareness, whether they know it or not—are leaders. You lead through kindness, generosity, tolerance, innovation, the quest for knowledge and a basic, resolved goodness that is incorruptible, inexhaustible and undefeatable." Henry Rollins, Pop Culture Renaissance Man, speaking at Sonoma State University

"...the world needs your inexperience. There is something about the fresh perspective, the naïveté, the limitless energy that comes along with youth and inexperience that enables recent graduates to solve problems that many more experienced people have given up on." Wendy Koop, founder of Teach for America, at Washington University

"Careers focused on lifting up our communities - whether it's helping transform troubled schools or creating after-school programs or training workers for green jobs. These careers are not always obvious, but today they are necessary." First Lady Michelle Obama at the University Of California-Merced

"There's nothing wrong with money or position. But at the end of the day, the source of true happiness and success is that you have that sense of personal satisfaction of knowing that you are doing something of value for the society that you are a part of."
Former Secretary of State Colin Powell at Franklin & Marshall College

Find more commencement day highlights at CBS Evening News.

Schools Working with Community: A Radical Idea?

By Pat Rossiter, Connecticut YOUTH Forum Program Manager

This recent article from the Associated Press piqued my interest.

It seems Waterbury Public Schools, along with other Connecticut school districts, is doing something radical: Teachers and parents will be participating with each other in the management of the schools!

I have to say, I’m confused, confounded and amazed all at once. I guess I figured they had been doing this all along. In Forum-land, two heads are generally better than one and people are happier and more productive when they get to participate in the decision making.

Would it be crazy of me to suggest they talk to the kids too? OK…maybe that’s going too far.

On a slightly more inspirational note… let's hear it for this amazing kid!