In any walk of life, achieving perfection is rare, and it’s usually celebrated. Think about a no-hitter in baseball, a hole-in-one in golf, a perfect 10 score in gymnastics.
Those, however, are moments. It’s arguably much more impressive to be perfect in anything over a 13-year span. That’s what six South Florida high school graduates have just accomplished: perfect attendance in school throughout their academic lives.
“(They) worked their way through lots of challenges, adversity, they’ve made sacrifices to be able to accomplish this,” said Robert Runcie, superintendent of Broward County Schools.
The super six are Marlee Dauphin of Nova High School, Brianna Isaac of McArthur High, Carolina Restrepo and James Shetter of Western High, Hayden Miller of West Broward High School, and Christopher Stevens of Atlantic Technical High School.
“I want to thank my mom, she’s been the person who pushed me to do all this,” Christopher said on a Zoom call attended by Runcie and other school district officials.
As a public service, I’ve done the math for you. Each one of these kids went to school 2,279 days without missing a day.
“And the one thing I’ve learned from having perfect attendance,” James said in the same Zoom meeting, “is to pick and choose my battles between whether I should be going to the beach on senior skip day with my friends or sitting in that classroom learning a new concept that my teacher knows is very important.”
Local
“And we need that kind of mentality and that kind of toughness in this day and age as we deal with so many challenges in front of us,” Runcie added.
Carolina chimed in during the virtual meeting and said, “I think perfect attendance will help us all in the future because it really does set the foundation for how we’re going to be in our careers and in our jobs and university in general.”
Besides high GPA’S and the admiration of their teachers and peers, the super six are each receiving new laptops and a $1,000 scholarship, courtesy of the Broward Education Foundation.
It’s more proof that to a large extent, success starts with showing up.
