- May 4, 2024
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Students walk to their seats in the convention center.
Tammy Harper and Kaitlyn Konieczny
Megan Hardy, Hannah Watts, Isabelle Klein and Danielle Guida
Assistant Principal Mike Mullen tells the students a story.
Yesenia Zamarripa watches her friends Audriana Montez and Paige Fuiks hug before the ceremony.
Janet Hunter and Bailee French
Albert Orozeo helps his girlfriend, Elizabeth Belan, with her cap.
Paige Fuiks, right, fans Cheyenne Gibson's face to help her keep from crying.
Carolina Brandon, Hunter Katter, Heather Johnson and Melissa Danforth
Alexandra Zagorski checks her cap one last time before lining up.
Teachers and faculty line up to lead the graduates into the ceremony.
Carolina Brandon and Heather Johnson
The top ten percent of the class, who wore silver robes, walk to their seats.
Bailee French, class president, asks everyone to sit before beginning her speech.
Students watched the class movie, a conglomeration of photos and clips from their four years.
Craig Little, principal, talks about the Class of 2015's accomplishments.
Kayla Butler talks to her peers around failure and how sometimes, failure is actually success.
John Finnan
Rebecca Deibert delivers her commencement speech.
Maya Kwasniewski waits for her tassel to be turned.
Kaitlyn Konieczny shakes Principal Craig Little's hand before receiving her diploma.
Principal Craig Little turns tassels.
Lakewood Ranch's 490 seniors graduated at the convention center.
"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."
