Heartache, hope at graduation ceremony
‘Must move forward together’: Departing high school seniors walk and remember
after 9 p.m. Friday, 288 seniors from Uvalde High School performed a rite of passage that had almost eluded them: tossing their mortarboards into the air.
The speeches that had come before the traditional cap toss — at the school’s 2022 graduation ceremony at Honey Bowl Stadium — dealt with loss and the ability to carry on.
“I know our lives will never be the same, but I also know we must move forward together,” Hal Harrell, Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District superintendent, said in his address. “Class of 2022, our community will need the qualities that you possess — the unity, the leadership, the resiliency in difference-makers.”
After spending their last two years overcoming the many hurdles that the COVID-19 pandemic threw their way, these seniors have had to face the loss of 19 of their youngest classmates and two teachers in the May 24 mass shooting at Robb Elementary School, just three days before their graduation was set to take place.
The massacre would have been more than enough reason to throw out tradition, to scrap the ceremony altogether this year. But one month after the tragedy, students, administraas tors and families came together for a proper send-off into life after high school.
“For everything, there is a season,” said Randy Harris, the principal of Uvalde High School. “There is a time to cry and a time to laugh. There is a time to tear down and a time to build up. There’s a time to embrace and a time to heal. Everything is beautiful in its own time.”
Students, clad in dark red caps and gowns, and administrators who spoke at the graduation paid homage to the lives lost at Robb Elementary.
Valedictorian Abigail Kone read the names of the 19 students and made them honorary members of the 2022 graduating class. She also lauded the two fourth-grade teachers who died in the attack — Irma Garcia and Eva Mireles — as heroes.
“Please count your blessings and hug your family a little tighter,” Kone said. “Don’t let go of their memory, because it is now our job, as we enter society to shape it, it is our job to show sympathy to others and to change the world because we know what is needed.”
Blaine Bennett, 71, a former educator and counselor, attended the graduation ceremony along with eight or nine family members, all there to cheer on his 17-year-old grandson, Miller Carnes.
The graduate will attend TexShortly
Tech University this summer, joining the agricultural sciences and natural resources program. Bennett said his grandson’s wish has always been to return home to Uvalde after college graduation to become a farmer like his father.
In the days after the shooting, Bennett said, it was obvious the graduation ceremony would be put on hold, and maybe even canceled.
“Everybody knew there was no way. The heart of the town was just ripped out, and it wouldn’t be right on so many levels,” Bennett said.
His grandson’s class was given a chance to decide whether to press on with graduation. The majority rejected the idea of canceling
the ceremony. They wanted to walk the stage at a later date.
“Miller, my grandson, who sometimes is wise beyond his years, said, ‘I think I need this for closure,’ and I think that is insightful of him,” Bennett said. His family supported him, even if they were nervous about attending a large gathering.
Bennett said his grandson was part of the traditional Senior Elementary School Walk at Robb Elementary the day before the shooting. Graduating seniors paraded through the hallways, high-fiving their youngest classmates.
“It’s such a wonderful event that helps those little kids understand ‘I want to do that one day,’” Bennett said. “Miller and his seniors were at Robb campus doing that, and there is no doubt he high-fived those 19 kids that we lost. That is a memory in his head that he’ll carry with him for a lifetime.
“Around every corner and turn, there is some connection,” he added.
Bennett knows that memories of the senior walk and the horror that unfolded the next day will weigh on his grandson and his fellow classmates, just as it will on the Uvalde community at large. He hopes the graduates will comfort each other.
“They are a special group of kids,” Bennett said about his grandson’s graduating class. “My wish is that they are able to go off and grow up and experience the world.
“And the legacy goes on. Uvalde is a loving, tight-knit community, and those kids are going to carry the tradition forward,” he said.
Before the students moved their tassels from the right side of their caps to the left, many of them cried.
“Our class also asks for change — change that will prevent any other tragedy, whether it is at a school, grocery store or concert,” senior Lynd Diangzan said in her farewell address. “I’m so proud of my class. No one can fully understand what our class went through, except for us. And we hope no one will ever experience what we went through.”