Watson Chapel top grad tenacious
the time Aaliyah Handy reached the ninth grade, she knew she wanted to be a high school valedictorian.
“I was thinking, I’m kind of scared to talk to people, but it’s OK,” she said. “I’ll figure it out. But I want to be it.”
During Watson Chapel High School’s graduation starting at 7 tonight, Handy will take the stage on the arena floor of the Pine Bluff Convention Center as the class of 2021’s top graduate.
The dream, now materialized, started for Handy while attending Ridgway Christian School from fifth through ninth grades. It was her fourth school system since preschool; she previously attended Pine Bluff, Pulaski County and White Hall districts.
“Academics are important because a lot of people don’t think they matter, but they matter because colleges look at that,” Handy said. “They love looking at your GPA. They look at your ACT scores and how you’re doing academically. It kind of does affect your ACT score because what you do learn in school is going to be on that ACT test.
That’s how you get a lot of scholarship money because college is expensive.”
Handy, who sported a 4.2 GPA, made the grade by turning in work well before the due date, especially when having to do a number of research essays in English.
“I would have my rough draft up in like two days,” she said, “and by the end of that first week, I would want to give it to my teacher so she could read it and let me know what I need to do because there were a lot of new things that I learned as far as essays, like writing in third person, which I had never known how to do. That was the hardest essay I ever had to do.”
One of the papers Handy prepared was on youth entrepreneurship, something she practices with her mother by making T-shirts and chocolate-covered sweets.
“I do want to own my own business one day as well as go on to practice as a physician’s assistant,” she said.
Handy will attend the University of Central Arkansas to major in biology with a focus on
nursing and plans to attend a two-year physician’s assistant program afterward. Her goal is to concentrate on pediatrics as a physician’s assistant and start her own practice with her mother LaShandra Shelton, a registered nurse at Jefferson Home Care.
“She saw the things I did for my patients, and I mostly take care of elderly patients, but she just had the love for the babies and the children,” said Shelton. Handy’s father, Darrius Handy, is a private investigator and bail bondsman.
Handy put her nursing skills to work during her senior year. Her grandmother Linda Callaway was hospitalized with covid-19 in January and nearly died, by her own account. Also, Shelton tore her anterior cruciate ligament and meniscus in her right knee, in which she suffers from arthritis.
So Handy did the cooking, cleaning and grocery shopping among other errands to take care of the ones who took care of her. But her heart has been with children since an early age.
“I used to have kids go to national competitions [in Family, Career and Community Leaders of America],” said Callaway, a former club advisor and teacher in the Pine Bluff School District. “Aaliyah was on the bus with me and my students. She practiced every Saturday since she was 5 [years old]. Her car seat was on the school bus, and I was driving the small van to Nashville and everywhere else. She always talked about, ‘I just want to deliver babies. I just want to deliver babies.’”
Handy took part in Family, Career and Community Leaders of America at Watson Chapel along with student council, Spanish club, Beta Club and National Honor Society. She was president of the Future Business Leaders of America and played second base on the Lady Wildcats’ softball team.
“Really, I like all the different activities, the sports part and the socializing part,” she said.
“I like learning new things. I realized that when covid hit, and I had to quote-unquote teach by myself. That was something I didn’t like.”
So as soon as the 2020-21 school year began, Handy elected to return to campus instead of learn virtually.
“I can’t learn by myself,” she said. “I have to be around other people and feed off their ideas, and they can feed off mine.” The hallowed halls of Watson Chapel is where Handy got to master the art of her favorite subject, mathematics.
“It’s not like any other subject,” she said. “It’s so different. You don’t get letters with numbers in other subjects and try to figure that out. They’re brain-teasers all the time, and once you figure that out, it becomes fun to figure it out, like in a college algebra class. At first, I was like, ‘oh, my gosh. This is hard.’ but you sit down and take your notes, it becomes addictive. I want to do more problems.”
Tonight, the problem solver will enlighten her classmates one more time.