Seniors at Rosenort School will be tossing up their grad caps in the air with perhaps a mix of relief and nostalgia as they say farewell to their secondary school career come this Thursday.

Though the class is relatively small with less than 25 students, valedictorian Sarah Schulz said there is just as much diversity of interests and beliefs in her grade as there is in any other school, big or small.

“We have people, including myself, who are into multiple things including sports, drama, music and everything… it’s very even throughout the whole class,” she said.

Despite the differences, Schulz said graduation has inspired new friendships and has ignited old ones as their time together comes to an end.

“This past year we’ve definitely been realizing, ‘Oh, we’re never going to see each other again; we should probably do something as a class,’ so we have been getting together and becoming [closer] in the past couple months… because we’ve been taking for granted the time we have together,” she said.

A memory Schulz recalled when reflecting on this past year was when the senior class designed a haunted house for Halloween for the rest of the school to enjoy.

“It was actually pretty successful; we definitely scared a lot of people. It was kind of cool seeing all of us come together,” she said, adding that many past events took place with only a few students contributing, but this time nearly the whole class joined in.

It is times such as these that Schulz said she will remember for a long time, which relates to the theme of Rosenort’s graduation: “To live a life you will remember;” something Schulz said she will focus on in her valedictorian speech.

In her speech, Schulz will draw on the experience of losing a classmate in a house fire back in 2015, something she said affected all the Rosenort students. From this, she plans to encourage her peers to live a life worth living.

After graduation, Schulz said she will miss seeing familiar faces within the community as she moves on to a new adventure overseas with Youth With A Mission (YWAM) this coming fall.