Welcome friends and family. Welcome Class of 2013 to your graduation from Prairie Ridge. This is the day where we finally realize what everything we’ve worked for means. These 4 years have helped us prepare for the future. Using the cliché that you’ve probably heard a thousand times – our time is now. Our teachers and the staff and Mr. Humpa and our friends and our family have helped us get to this point. Look around you. Everyone wants you to succeed, and now you have. We made it safely through PR’s hallways. Now we’re on to bigger and better things.
We are the Class of 2013 – the only class that adds up. 2+0+1=3 What does that mean? We have had roughly 720 days of school. 14 school dances. 4 snow days. 12 fire drills – announced and unannounced. 10 concerts. 4 meet the teams. 8 plays. 10 silly freshman seminar games. 120 laps around the track for gym class. 600 books checked out of the library. 1323 sporting events. 300 geometry proofs. 100 late nights finishing papers and projects. 124 Monday mornings sleeping in. 4 musicals. 1 graduation. 4 years of high school at Prairie Ridge.
But what does all that add up to? Some of you would say a lot of math. The nerds would pull out their calculators and say 3358. But I say memories. We’ve accomplished and experienced a lot in our 17 or 18 years of life. We will always remember counting down the days to the start of school and to the end of school. We will remember our first day of high school, trying not get lost in this new and unfamiliar place. We will remember long choir concerts with random fire alarms going off. We will remember meeting new people and exploring different classes. We will remember waiting anxiously to see if school was canceled because of the snow. We will remember walking as slow as possible to stay in front of the teacher and still get a 5. We will remember discovering an adventure hidden between the pages of a book. We will remember cheering the Wolves on to victory during various sporting events and singing the school song obnoxiously loud on the bus ride home. We will remember making music with our friends at choir and band concerts. We will remember tedious math problems that don’t make any sense. We will remember awful hill workout Mondays. We will remember debating various subjects with our friends. We will remember saying to ourselves, “Oh, I can do that later” and then finishing the night before like the procrastinators we are. We will remember our friends and our teachers. We will remember today. We will remember PR.
Our years here can be summed up into 1 number, but they are so much more than that. We know what those numbers represent and which memories that will last. All of our times at Prairie Ridge have been different, yet we share core experiences. Each individual here has a different number to which his or her life adds up to so far. We’re doing good – I mean, well. Now the future is there for us to make more memories – we just have to look up and forward to the future. But here’s where it gets crazy: it is our time to shine and it is up to us what we do with these next few years and how we take advantage of all the opportunities we’ve been given. Every day is a great day to be alive. Don’t be that guy who wastes your future – it is a blessing given to us in part by Prairie Ridge. Each day we have the opportunity to create our 1% of memories where we have to decide what counts and what doesn’t. I mean, A#1, in the end, there is just 1 question: What will our lives add up to?
Thank you to all of you for creating these memories and racking up the numbers. Thank you to the teachers for helping us as students find things worthy to add to our list of memories. Thank you to all of the parents and family members who have made this experience possible and supported us throughout our education. And thank you for today, a time to celebrate who we have been, and a time to discover how much more we can be.