The Long County High School class of 2024 received their diplomas Saturday, May 18. With the threat of severe weather bearing down on them, 271 seniors walked across the stage before the rain started a little before noon.
Class President Audrey Buttler welcomed everyone to the graduation ceremony. She started saying that she “practiced the speech several times to avoid crying” but knew that in the end she wouldn’t be able to do so.
Buttler encouraged her classmates to live in the moment and to cherish graduating by saying: “At this moment, graduating is not a story yet. It is happening right now. Be proud that you are graduating today, because one day, this will just be a story that you tell your loved ones.”
Salutatorian Leora Hyde talked about strengths and weaknesses. She reminded them that they should never look at life as if it were a math problem since “there is no right answer.”
“High school allowed us to see first-hand our strengths and weaknesses,” Hyde said. “Whether it be communicating, mathematics, athletics, music or something else entirely. We all have our abilities in certain fields. Despite these weaknesses, we made it. We persevered through it all.”
Valedictorian Marissa Stamos then talked to her classmates about firsts and lasts.
“Have you all been reflecting on how many firsts and lasts like I have?” she questioned. “The first day of school way back when. The first time your parents dropped you off and you refused to leave their steadfast arms to the last time you were ever picked up by them. Wasn’t that just yesterday? What about the more recent firsts and lasts? The last day of grade school ever. The first time you ever felt connected to your friend group to yall’s last hangout. The first point you earned for your team and the uproarious cheering to the last time hearing that blaring buzzer and the end of the game.”
After graduates received their diplomas, class Vice President Matthew Tedesco gave the class of 2024 one final farewell.
He talked about routines and telling his fellow graduates about them all having the “same agenda: make it to graduation.”
He talked about the “swirl of emotions” everyone must be feeling as they went from “children, wide-eyed and scared” to being “ready to leave into the great unknown.”
He talked about memories they experienced from “the roar of the crowd at pep rallies to Kyleigh and I passing out on roller coasters at Six Flags…and Steven thinking Mrs. Rollins wouldn’t catch on to him giving everyone the same version of the test when we had a sub.”
In the end, the class of 2024 and its 271 graduates is the largest class of graduates in Long County High School history.