Amazing Discoveries at Graduation

Two graduations in one day: My daughter graduated 8th grade from middle school in South Orange, then to Livingston to the high school where I graduated 33 years ago (how is that possible?) to cover the LHS Class of 2011's commencement. featured solid and funny speeches with words of advice and a fond farewell to Pamela Clause McGroarty, my gym teacher years ago. I wrote this story on some amazing discoveries at my daughter's graduation. It makes me wonder about the hidden talents of things yet to be discovered in my hometown.

Brian Osborne, Dr. Brian Osborne, the Superintendent of South Orange-Maplewood Schools, made a surprise entrance to an 8th grade graduation ceremony this week when he road into the South Orange Middle School gym on – a unicycle!

Turns out the school superintendent was a pretty good unicyclist when he was a kid. One of the surprising things the graduates discovered during Thursday’s commencement at SOMS.

Their principal, Kirk Smith, retiring as middle school principal, took a portable mic to move among the students. “There’s a lot about us that you really don’t know.”

Really? Aren’t you just the guy who’s always on the school’s PA? Just saying, the teens were probably thinking.

Sure, that and more, Smith revealed: A certified scuba diver, a bungee jumper, a sky diver.

 Kirk Smith?

 And Brian Osborne on a unicycle?

Osborne said he found his first unicycle at a garage sale around the age of 11. This was before kids wore helmets and on his inaugural ride, he fell, hit his head, and woke up in the hospital.

 When he got home, his mom asked if he wanted to go back out and try again.

And he did.

It was a lesson for the graduates that hopefully they won’t soon forget. To try something difficult. To seize all that life has to offer. To try again when they fall.

 “When you do make that fall,” Smith told his “sons and daughters” of the Class of 2011, your parents are “going to be the first one to stick a hand out and help you get back on your feet.”

 “You’re a fantastic group of kids,” Smith told the 240 graduates. “You have honor. You have integrity. You have . And boy, can you dance.”

The principal paused to slip on a SOMS T-shirt. His daredevil days have passed. "Who I am," said Smith on a hot and muggy graduation day in a crowded middle school gym, "is an honored member of the SOMS Class of 2011. That’s who I am.”

And then it was back to the podium. Osborne’s unicycle tucked safety beneath a folding chair and Smith with one last thing to say:

 “It’s time to make you all high school students."