Excerpt from Board Chair Cassie Hunt’s Celebration Speech
Over the last few weeks, the Community School Class of 2020 graduated from high school—a ceremony particularly meaningful for their parents, as their CS graduation was canceled by COVID.
In August, our graduates will enroll at JMU, Wake Forest, Auburn, Virginia Tech, Fordham, VCU, Mary Washington, and UVA, among others.
The class includes:
- a professional ballet dancer who just concluded a tour with the European Royal Classical Ballet,
- a two-time first-team all-district soccer player,
- a playwright with two shows already produced and staged,
- an accomplished mathematician who is also a published poet,
- the creator of a grant-winning program that refurbishes computers to donate to needy community members, and
- a 3rd-degree decided black belt.
Two of our graduates, who got their start with Elena, were internationally certified as bilingual in Spanish while still in high school.
The Patrick Henry High School salutatorian, a Hidden Valley valedictorian, numerous AP Scholars, the AP Government Student of the Year, and the AP English Senior of the Year are members of the CS Class of 2020.
A Rodman Scholar at UVA—which recognizes the top 5% of incoming engineering students—a National Merit Scholar, and the winner of a prestigious Witt Fellowship at the University of Alabama (which provides a full ride covering both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree) are also among them.
Yes, our approach to education works. These examples of artistic, athletic, and academic accomplishments show what you can achieve with the foundation Community School provides.
None of those achievements would have been possible without the Community School teachers sitting here with us tonight—and those who came before them. There are not enough adjectives for me to describe all that they give, because it is so much more than all we can see.
