Lakewood Ranch seniors say goodbye to high school

"Who cares what others think of you? Dare to be yourself," Senior Class President Bailee French told her fellow 489 classmates.

The Lakewood Ranch High School seniors graduated yesterday at the Bradenton Area Convention Center, amid applause—and a few cheers— from friends and family.

All three of the commencement speakers, including French, had different advice for their peers moving forward in life.

Kayla Butler described her story of failure—and how sometimes, failure is actually a success. Bulter tried and failed to get

on the cheerleading team, but then she gave Future Farmers of America a try, and found her true passion in agriculture. 

"Don't let someone else define who or what you are," she said. "Learn to fail, or fail to learn."

Rebecca Deibert broke down the seniors' four years of school by the numbers. She even calculated the number of minutes that had passed from the first day of freshman year until graduation—or at least, she said Google had told her.

She emphasized, however, that no one was a number, and asked her peers to look out into the crowd and find their friends and family.

"Find those parents who stood by you—even when they couldn't stand you!" Deibert said. "Thank them. They have kept you from being a number."