Three local high school valedictorians described the effect of pandemic restrictions as fortifying while offering an optimistic vision for a future shaped by Sunshine Coast graduates.
A member of the Grade 12 class at each of Pender Harbour Secondary, Chatelech Secondary, and Elphinstone Secondary schools was selected to speak during commencement celebrations. The Sunshine Coast Alternative School did not designate a valedictorian this year.
“I’ve learned that students have this amazing ability to get great things done two hours before the due date,” said Chatelech’s Matthew Douglas in his remarks on June 21. “Tonight is that due date for all the experiences and all the memories we wanted to make in high school.”
In his speech, Douglas polled the audience about the relative value of coloured cardboard and paper money. “The point I was getting across is the idea that it’s our world — and if we don’t like something, we have the ability to change it,” said Douglas in an interview with Coast Reporter. “It’s just something that we do: We make things out of nothing all the time.”
Abby Ridd, of Elphinstone, said that the collective challenges faced by COVID-era grads turned them into a class distinguished by “our cohesiveness, our compatibility and our camaraderie.”
She admitted that months of socially-distanced education fell short of her classmates’ expectations of pandemonium. “Not only did it squash our dreams of living through a high school movie like Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, we didn’t even get a cool apocalypse movie,” she observed to laughter from her audience. “You know, we were all expecting to live our Maze Runner dreams, and all we got was Zoom calls and social anxiety.”
In a later interview with Coast Reporter, Ridd added, “Graduating in a pandemic is hard. And it sounds kind of cheesy, but I think it made us closer. [During social distancing] we didn’t get to see each other for so long that being together now is more appreciated. I think it helped us grow closer as a class.”
For Holden Charlton of Pender Harbour, who delivered his speech on June 21, distance was something that his classmates took in stride. “This school is special because the people accept themselves, they try to be as happy as possible and they try to fix conflict regardless of the situation,” he noted in his remarks. “Our ability to deal with conflict is unique. It might be because there’s no bus service to Pender and we can’t go anywhere that we’re forced to deal with our challenges.”
Charlton, in a later interview, acknowledged that isolation helped transform his classmates into more confident, independent learners. “We’ve had to learn to have our own work ethic and own schedule because everything was online,” he said. “And it definitely improved our social skills — like being able to speak with people that you haven’t met before — , since most of us had jobs through the COVID times.”
Both Ridd and Douglas received instruction in public speaking through workshops provided by Sunshine Coast Toastmasters clubs. Last year, Douglas earned the Air Cadet League of Canada National Effective Speaking Gold Medal for his oratorical prowess.
Charlton, who plans to study sports medicine or kinesiology at Simon Fraser University, is determined to transform the world by making more people smile. “I know it’s more of a stressful time now. I feel like people need to realize they should look into the light more,” he said.
Ridd will also be attending SFU, where she plans to obtain a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in film. “I think growing up on the Sunshine Coast has really helped us,” she said. “We learned to get to know people and how to be a community member, and appreciate what you have.”
Douglas, who will study in the Faculty of Arts at the University of British Columbia, concluded his valedictorian address with a prediction.
“My full thanks [to parents, teachers and the community] is going to come in about 20 years,” he said. “In 20 years, we will have made full use of all the sacrifices that these people have made for us, and we will have made the world a place we really want to live in—when we take the concepts and visions from our minds and make them our new reality. I’m already looking forward to it.”
