The Challenge of the Class of 2024

Hello, Oak Hill class of 2024, friends, and family. My name is Athibeault24. I am an OHHS 2024 graduate and have always been in the RSU4 community. I’ve gotten to know many of you while at RSU4; some people have been here for four years, just in high school. We have grown closer than ever in the past four years of high school. These past four years have tested our resilience like a beach towel on a windy day. Our class has faced the challenge of COVID-19 head-on. We left school abruptly in the middle of our 8th-grade year and returned to regular school in our sophomore year. 

Despite these obstacles, this class has shown incredible resilience. I’m sure we all remember the 1600 minutes of Membean, which felt like a heavy burden at the end of each year. As the class of 2024, we are entering our college years, or we’re going into the workforce, and I know that everyone will strive to be their best. I reflected on returning to the first year when we walked through those doors for the first time,—looking at all the other students, thinking that we didn’t belong here like that and would never graduate, and this would be a challenge.  As a senior, I don’t think I could ever be so wrong and right in my first years. Because of COVID, it made the gym set up a certain way that I don’t miss.  In the first year of the gym class, the gym was set up in the lines of tables on the Red carpet with ample open space and this small whiteboard at the front of the class. I now remember the first time we got to go to the gym after COVID-19 and do the student of the month with Chuck a Duck. I remember how hard it was to get kids to remember their number on the ducks. I look back at all our challenges as a class or school. I remember when it was decided not to have a fifth science teacher and how it looked for our class. We lost the opportunity to take a robotics class. Or when we had the cold day in February 2023, It hit around -33 degrees. We lost the whole science wing, and we couldn’t do some of the labs that we wanted to do in chemistry. When it came to testing for AP classes, it would bring kids out of our classes and make it hard to do much work on that day, as well as when we had to face the junior science test. That day felt like it would never end, as if those classrooms were a jail cell, and we were waiting for those doors to open. Or the first time trying to park in the student parking lot my sophomore year, That afternoon did not go well. Try to get to work on time and deal with the challenge of the student parking lot at Dismissal. 

As a class, we have overcome numerous challenges, and today, as we bid farewell, those challenges end as a class. But they have not been in vain. They have prepared us for the journey ahead, and equipped us with the strength to face any problem that comes our way. So, Oak Hill Class of 2024, remember the resilience we have shown, stay strong and keep moving forward. The world is waiting for us.

“The Graduates” by Game of EPL5 & LUMIX G20/F1.7 is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.