When Jay Preskenis watches the Ashland High School graduation ceremony each June from his fold-up chair at Lithia Park, he appreciates the walk, diploma handoff and traditional mortarboard toss-up in a way few in the audience — AHS staffers included — can.
That’s because as a member of the school’s Student Services Team, Ashland High’s assistant principal knows exactly what some of those students had to overcome in order to arrive at that moment, and even now, only three months into the nine-month school year, he laughs out loud at the memory of dozen, two dozen, a hundred dozen success stories.
“Oh, it’s amazing,” Preskenis said, drawing out the second "a" to make it "amaaaaaaaaazing." “You know that they’ve overcome obstacles that no one has ever seen and they look like it’s run of the mill, one of 270 other kids graduating and you know what familial obstacles they’ve overcome, what social obstacles they’ve overcome, what possible illnesses they’ve overcome, and you’re enormously proud that they’ve had the grit and the stick-to-itiveness to hold down a part-time job, to continue to play baseball, to take care of their little sister and to get a 2.5 GPA so that they could qualify for the Oregon Promise.
“And they’ve done all those things kind of quietly and shown up for class every day, and you know that as a first-year student at Ashland High School they were ready to drop out. It’s crazy. It’s so amazing.”
[For more of this story, written by Joe Zavala, go to http://www.dailytidings.com/ne...s-stick-to-itiveness]
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