Who was Newton South Class of 2017's Student Speaker?

NEWTON, MA — Standing near the front of the line of students dressed alike in navy blue graduation caps and gowns, Jadon Smith looks ahead of her past the administrator holding the walkie talkie as she, and the hundreds of others wait to march into Newton South’s field house for the last time as high schoolers. In a couple hours the students will walk out no longer students, but alumni and close this chapter on their childhood. They will do it in this uniform, together.

Although some have special yellow chords or different colored carnations on their lapels, in graduation outfits it’s almost difficult to tell the students apart. They are all rustling around with seemingly nervous energy. And the class has been through quite a bit together. And Jadon is the one selected to sum it all up and tell them what it means within the hour.

Jadon has walked the halls with these people for the past four years. She’s gone to school with some of them since kindergarten. And in some ways her journey is representative of so many others who have graduated at Newton South before her and those who graduated with her on June 8.

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Through the ups and downs that accompany high school, Jadon used her determination, humor and work ethic. She said perhaps it was due in part to the fact that she had been a METCO student and was acutely aware of the opportunity it afforded her to go to school in a school district such as Newton. She made honor roll every year since the 6th grade, she says. But it wasn't easy.

"There are so many opportunities that I wouldn’t be able to get if I went to Boston public schools. And it’s a sad thing that that’s not available. But with me being so lucky to go to such a great school in a great community I just wanted to take advantage of as many opportunities as I could,” she says.

And she did. In addition to maintaining her top grades and working at the Moyzilla Food Truck, she took AP classes, tried to have a social life, hopped into clubs testing them out here and there, before finally taking a lead in the courageous conversations on race program, the Black Student Union and achieving Legacy Scholar status. Junior year she was elected the vice president of her class and was a class officer her senior year, even taking the stage as the chosen student to speak at graduation.

Leaving Newton is bittersweet she said. Both liberating and sad. Like many of her fellow students she will miss this community and the communities within Newton that she was a part of.

She will forever remember joining a friend to run for class office her junior year on a whim to help support her friend and getting up in the auditorium to speak to her class.

“I somehow captivated them and they had enough faith in me to vote me to be their vice president,” she says. She’d never considered herself the “popular girl” type but the the vote opened her eyes to honesty in public service.

“I definitely want to give back to the community,” she says.

She captivated her audience once again at graduation, eliciting much laughter and some nodding of heads and some cheers as she joked with them, and compared their journey to that of Toby the Sloth who she had seen on Animal Planet. Despite that, she said there was a serious undertone in her speech.

“I want them to take away how privileged they are…. Besides the jokes, the main point is that life is a journey and we just completed one heck of a journey and despite the ups and downs we’ve had, we did it. And not only we did it but we should also recognize that we are so lucky to have done this,” she says.

Some of the downs included a string of hate speech at the school. Jadon involved herself in the healing work on that. In the past the school would teach to a certain curriculum in advisory on the topic of bullying and racism, but for the most recent string, remembers Jadon, it didn’t seem to be taken seriously by students. So staff reached out to students who were impacted, and they did a video series in which volunteers recalled an incident of bullying or hate speech that happened to them.

Jadon volunteered to tell her story. She said she knew that by putting herself and her story out there and sharing it would put her in a vulnerable position but she also knew something else. “I knew that people think it just doesn’t happen here, but it does, unfortunately. I knew that in telling my story it would be beneficial to at least some people,” she said.

She told of an incident where she and some friends were chatting in the library about the college acceptance letters that were starting to come in, and a student she says she didn’t know was nearby and butted into the conversation to say the school she got into Johnson and Wales must have been a community college. Johnson & Wales is actually on the top list of colleges in the Northeast and is one of the top culinary schools in the country.

“That was just random,” she says of the incident. But it was illustrative.

Still, there were more ups than downs she says.

Jadon would know: She rattled off a list of inside jokes that the entire class seemed to get, while some in the audience shook their heads smiling. She was recently selected as a one of three winners of a Rotary Scholarship and honored at the Mayor’s Prayer Breakfast.

“It was a complete surprise. I didn’t expect it at all,” she says. “Me and my mom were there and we were just looking and taking everything in.”

Next up? She’s starting a new job at Davios in Chestnut Hill for the summer before heading off to Culinary School in Rhode Island.

Watch Jadon give her commencement speech here:

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Photo of Jadon Smith at graduation by Jenna Fisher/ Patch