Laura Calcara’s Salutatorian Address at Ramona High School

We’re done. Plain and simple. We have spent these past four years at Ramona High School learning from our friends, family and teachers, growing into the individuals whom all together make up the Class of 2012. And no matter where we go from here, we will all have the years we spent at RHS and the memories we made here uniting us.

Since our freshman year, we have made friends, kept friends, lost them and found them among the 414 individuals that make up the class of 2012.

Look around you; you have known these people almost your entire lives. With them you share your passions, secrets and countless inside jokes. When looking at them, you can see yourself.

You see a person that knows you so well they could retell your entire life’s story, knows how much you despise mustard yet puts it all over your food because they know you love them enough to think it’s funny.

You have eaten lunch with them every day and spent hours at each other’s houses “studying” when all you really do is talk, all the time not even realizing you have been making memories you will hold in the highest value once you go your separate ways.

Even though we will go on to create new relationships after today, the people sitting around us right now have impacted our lives and decisions and we will always carry a piece of them with us as we move on through life.

It has not only been our peers, but also our teachers who have had an impact on us during our time at RHS. We spend nearly seven hours every day with them and they have become like our second set of parents and no matter how much you try and deny it, you love them like they are.

Sometimes they irritate us; sometimes they may get a little frustrated with us. But they have always been there, teaching us what our parents couldn’t.

We have been drilled with enough facts and formulas to fill 10 textbooks, but really our teachers have taught us so much more than that. Mr. Knutsson doesn’t just push his students into understanding the most complex math on campus, but teaches by example that the passion you put into something is just as important as the understanding.

Mrs. Weaver not only taught her economic classes the laws of supply and demand, but had her students learn by experience that no matter how confused you may be in the beginning, if you put in the effort and time, in the end you’ll find yourself to be far above average.

Each year we must leave our teachers behind, but each year they give us their all, allowing us to take a piece of them with us as we move on in our lives.

This campus has been our home for four years—a blip of time when one thinks about it, yet so much has been packed into them: countless group projects, dances, 2012 dominating powderpuff, our one and done spirit boys, airband, football games, assemblies, thousands of essays and worksheets and all-nighters, all leading up to this amazing event we call graduation.

We have taken all that we can from our parents and teachers, but now it is our time to go out, make our own mistakes, spend an insane amount of money on four to eight years on a college education, leave our friends and meet all new people who will affect our lives in ways that no one we know now could have.

All these experiences and people will build inside of us, and one day we will finally know exactly the person we are and we’ll be able to teach and guide our own children to even greater heights than we have achieved at this very moment.

 of Ramona High’s graduation on June 14, 2012.