Schools
Ridgefield Valedictorian: 'Not Another Boring Address'
"This graduation may be the end of our high school experience, but it is certainly not the end of our growth..."
RIDGEFIELD, CT — It was a peculiar end to an odd year, as the 380 members of the Ridgefield High School Class of 2020 graduated Thursday afternoon.
The ceremony was split in two, with half the class graduating at noon and the remainder at 2:30 p.m. All seniors picked up their diplomas in a drive-by ceremony on June 12.
Among the speakers who presented across large monitors seen by students in their cars in the parking lot was Valedictorian Questin McQuilkin:
"Welcome, everyone. I’m Questin McQuilkin, the Class of 2020 Valedictorian, and I'd first like to invite all my classmates to take one collective sigh of relief for making it this far. Graduation, freedom from those grueling days of high school, is finally upon us.
"Now you all know what I'm going to say. You’ve heard this speech countless times before in every shape and form, whether in movies or stories or maybe at a sibling's graduation. The valedictorian addresses his or her classmates, inspires his or her classmates, and brings new words of wisdom as we move into the next phase of our lives. To sum it up quickly, we did good. We entered this school barely teenagers, but we grew and we learned, and look at us now: going off to college or wherever life takes us.
"But I don’t want this to be another boring address. I don’t want to echo the monotonous praises expected of a valedictorian’s speech. Quite frankly, you deserve better. We deserve better. This can’t just be a typical old speech, because the Class of 2020 is certainly not a typical old class.
I want you all to think just how much we've changed in our time at Ridgefield High School. We came into this school almost four years ago, hard to believe I know, and since then we’ve only grown. Of course in the literal sense, we were all much shorter back then. I remember not being able to see over the crowds in the hallways. My friends and I would scamper about at the feet of the upperclassmen, mortals to the gods towering above us. And in these past four years, we’ve grown straight up. We’re finally tall enough to see above those crowds to friends and classmates as we pass in the hallways.
"But more importantly, we've grown intellectually. We arrived at RHS as newbies to academia. The pythagorean theorem, something most of us probably never want to see again, was just a rumor or a legend. Yet we learned. We didn’t give up, throw our textbooks up in the air and storm off. We put pencil to paper, and expanded our minds. We learned how to graph sinusoidal waves and examine heredity through punnet squares. We met Gatsby, Huckleberry Finn, Odysseus and countless others. By now we're probably all sick of studying Shakespearean sonnets and reciting the quadratic formula. Marching into this school we were young and inexperienced, but we put in the work and advanced. We’ve come a long way since ninth grade, and it shows.
"This wave of growth extends beyond us as individuals. We’ve grown together. Friend groups expanded at RHS, welcomed new members and thrived. We met new classmates and connected through our common learning experiences. Who knew that simply sitting next to someone in class could lead to new connections and bonds, strong enough to survive well into the future? The friendships that resulted from this growth will stay with us for the rest of our lives.
"In a few years we may not remember the year when Constantinople fell, or precisely how to factor a polynomial. We may have forgotten some of the facts and notes we spent so long studying. But we have retained so much more. For at RHS, we grew not only in knowledge, but in ourselves. We learned how to persevere and prevail. We learned how to improve ourselves and our lives. Most of all, we learned how to learn.
"This graduation may be the end of our high school experience, but it is certainly not the end of our growth. RHS has prepared us well for the next stage of our lives, and now we can continue to expand our talents and our minds. I want to thank Dr. Gross for guiding us on our journey so far, as well as all the amazing teachers who made this growth possible. But most of all, I want to thank you, Class of 2020, for putting in the effort to learn and make it here today.
"It’s been a good few years. Let’s make these next ones even better."
