Beginning a new path in life can often be as terrifying as it can be promising. The Class of 2025 still remembers entering WA for the first time after a year of uncertainty and remote schooling. Now, with the class moving on from WA, little is known about what is to come, but the 2025 class speaker, senior Alana Parks, hopes to remind students what new beginnings truly mean by recognizing the courage her class has shown in the face of fear.
Just like many class speakers who came before her, Parks started writing her speech in performing arts teacher Michael Towers’s public speaking class.
“I took public speaking with [Towers] during semester one, and one of the assignments is to write a grad speech,” Parks said. “I wrote my speech and presented it in front of the class […] and then, around April, Dean Ware sent out an email and said you could submit a grad speech if you wanted to be the class speaker. And I did, and I auditioned twice, and then he told me that I got it.”
Although the judges unanimously chose her to be class speaker, Parks was still surprised to hear that she was selected for the role.
“I originally started with a pretty rough draft for [my public speaking] class, because I never thought I [was actually] going to perform a speech at graduation […] then I edited [the speech] a little bit for my first audition, and then [for] the second audition, I really changed [the speech] a lot, because I went over it with [Towers], and he helped me out with it,” Parks said.
Towers teaches the public speaking class at WA, and even though the class speaker does not have to be from his class, the speeches often originate from an assignment given by Towers that tasks students with creating a graduation speech.
Towers has had a seat on the selection committee for the class speaker for a number of years, but this year his role has been to coach Parks and prepare her for presenting her speech at graduation.
“Oftentimes, a student like [Parks], who has been exposed to the exercise of writing a graduation address, feels good enough to submit to [the committee] because it is open to every graduating senior,” Towers said. “So this year, [Parks] was a public speaking student in the fall section and wrote what I thought was a very striking, moving, and thoughtful piece. I thought so when I heard it initially in the fall, and certainly that was clear to the selection committee too.”
Having worked with the senior class in his public speaking course, and having worked at WA even before the class speaker role was established 20 years ago, Towers has a unique view into the thoughts and feelings of seniors entering graduation.
“[Parks is], like many seniors, [who] come into the classroom in the fall of their senior year, and there’s a lot of things that are scary, the process that they’re about to embark on, this selection process of applying to schools, that can be overwhelming and scary for most of us,” Towers said.
One thing that Towers was able to observe over the course of the year that he has worked with Parks is her growth as a speaker and student.
“The transformation that I’ve seen in her from September of her senior year until now is a remarkable thing. Now, what I see is a confident, aware, conscious, self-conscious in a wonderful way, student who is proud [of her] thoughts, feelings, reflections, and [she] is capable in delivering that,” Towers said. “So it’s been really wonderful to see her maturity and growth […] I’m proud of her, and I can see that she is proud of herself and knowing that she’s got something to offer in this regard.”
Parks chose to take some time in her speech to recognize the challenges her class faced, especially as they entered WA.
“We were misbehaving a lot [when we first came to WA]. So we were called to the PAC, and I think it was five or six seniors that were in there, and they gave us a talk, and they said, ‘You guys got to shape up.’ So I mentioned that as well as COVID briefly,” Parks said.
The larger theme Parks hopes to express in her speech is the new beginning that graduation will bring.
“The biggest theme of the speech as a whole is beginning, and what it really means to graduate, because I think there’s so much lead up to graduation itself that it’s easy to forget what [graduation] really means,” Parks said.
The class speaker is a position with no academic or extracurricular requirements. But that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t take skill to rise to the occasion.
“I want for everybody to know that [the class speaker] could be anybody,” Towers said. “I know that people [ask], ‘Do you have to be the captain of this team? Do you have to be the valedictorian? Do you have to be in this series of classes? Do you have to be a theater student?’ Certainly not. It could be anybody, but the skill or the quality that this person needs to have, is for them to embody the spirit of this class.”
Graduation provides seniors with an opportunity to look back on their journey through high school, where they have come from, and what they accomplished.
“I think we have a pretty impressive class as a whole. There’s a lot of really hard workers in the Class of ‘25 and a lot of really impressive accomplishments. I want that to be highlighted the most. That as a class, we persevered. We started out rough, and we ended up in a great place,” Parks said.
