BLACKSVILLE – Tyra Kelly put a beach theme on her mortarboard Sunday afternoon, adorning the top of the academic headwear with tiny seashells and a cut-out cartoon of a smiling sea turtle.
Does that mean the member of Clay-Battelle’s Class of 2023 is going to the place where sand and waves abound for, say, a graduation trip?
“Are you kiddin’?” the senior asked, grinning.
“I’m going to work.”
Tyra was among the 48 graduates who took to the football field on the mostly sunny Sunday afternoon for the school’s 84th commencement ceremonies.
The small assemblage of seniors put up “impressively huge numbers,” Principal David Cottrell said.
Numbers, which – relatively speaking, he said – rank the class with any other one out there.
His seniors garnered more than $500,000 in scholarships and other awards.
“They’re good kids and they work hard,” he said.
There are six Promise scholars in the class among 2023’s 48, the principal said.
Six are scholarship athletes.
And 32 – or 74.4% of the class – are completers in career technical education programs, including Tyra, who will soon report to her first day of work as a pharmacy technician at WVU Medicine Children’s.
“I’m proud of them,” he said, “especially when you look at everything they had to deal with on their way to senior year.”
“Everything,” as in the pandemic, which ran their freshman year off the rails and made their stint as sophomores a day-to-day exercise, as the contagion waxed and waned.
“Yeah, that was a time,” said Mason Chisler, who is off to Waynesburg University.
He’ll play football on scholarship while studying business.
The fleet-footed safety who starred for the gridiron Cee-Bees is one of those career education completers Cottrell was bragging about, while also being student body president and a member of the National Honor Society.
“I had a great experience,” Mason said.
“I’m gonna miss everybody, but I am anxious to get going.”
Before that, though, he and his classmates took time, to, well – not get going.
Everybody slowed down to regard the environs for one final go-around.
Clay-Battelle is made for that.
There’s all that history.
All that longevity.
The school began its life as a masonry marvel, constructed under the Works Progress Administration in 1939.
Renovations and additions over the years have given Clay-Battelle sleek, contemporary lines – but sepia-tone group portraits lining hallway walls of long-ago classes can still turn the place into a time machine, for anyone who wants to look up.
Senior class president Allison King, who will also be a freshman at Waynesburg, talked about that dynamic in the glass-fronted entryway of her soon-to-be alma mater, in the minutes before the ceremony.
“Most of us have been together for 13 years,” she said.
“We grew up together and now we’re turning the page to the new chapter, together.”
Cottrell, who is also a Clay-Battelle alum, along with his parents – and they were high school sweethearts, in fact – shook his head and grinned as one more 12th grade narrative spooled out.
One more round of horseplay.
One more round of huddled conferences.
One more laugh over an inside joke – and one more chance to simply hang out in the hallway, as seniors are wont to do.
They then ducked into the auditorium, where the principal dispensed encouragement and instructions before the band kicked up “Pomp and Circumstance.”
“You guys good?” he asked. “We’re all good here, right?”
“Yes, sir,” they replied, as one.
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