It’s time to leave. It’s time to say goodbye to our family we love.It's time to say goodbye to the people that we’ve gone to school with everyday since elementary school. Its time to say goodbye to friends that have been through everything with you. It’s time to pack up everything we love and cherish into cardboard boxes.It’s time to share a tiny box of a room with a complete stranger that may end up being your new bestfriend . It’s time for new connections to be made with people you never thought you would connect with. It’s time for our first all nighters cramming for our first college exam. Its time to go off on our own in this world and finally realize what we can do. It’s time to say hello to the beginning of our life. Administrators, teachers, family, friends, Class of 2014, it is a honor to speak in front of you today. My fellow graduates, today is our day, we're off to Great Places! Some of us are going off to college,others are going to travel the world and applying to get jobs. Up until this point we were children, some more so than others. Some of us had it rough, and others had it easy. We all knew what it took to get us here. As many of us today celebrate the ending of our High school years and look forward to college, we also look back on past 18 years. We look back to our first day of school pictures our parents made us take every year and remember the nervousness of transitioning from one grade to another. When we were little, our parents choose what we wore most days. Now we go out and buy our own clothes.Before we turned 16, we relied on our parents to get us where we needed to be. Now we take off on our own, sometimes not even telling them where we are going.We have learned how to make decisions for ourselves, and now we are to the point where each choice we make is all on us.
All through our childhood, our parents have worked to pay for our food, clothing, and housing. Now we have jobs ourselves and pay for those things, or soon will.
However often we have disagreed or fought with them, our parents have been there for us throughout our whole elementary, middle school, and high school lives and are going to still be there as we grow up. That deserves a thank you.Also our teachers! Whether they instructed us in preschool on how to tie our shoelaces or when we grew up and came here to West Potomac and they taught