Seana Cleary graduated summa cum laude at Washington Township High School’s 52nd commencement ceremony
Seana Cleary’s salutatorian speech to her fellow graduating classmates at the 52nd Washington Township High School Commencement ceremony wished for happiness and compassion as each of the 575 seniors began their separate paths.
“Today marks the day that our paths, moving in the same basic direction for the past 18 years, split off into 575 different directions,” Cleary said. “Five hundred seventy five opportunities to shape the world, lightly perhaps, but with enough passion that each person we meet and each place we visit is better than it was before.”
Cleary said she hopes her classmates will take the gifts they have been given and use them to choose “happiness and love” on their journeys through life.
“We are informed, connected and far from the lazy generation that everyone takes us as,” Cleary said to her peers on June 15. “We know change is possible because we’ve seen it happen. We aren’t the generation to sit back and be silent in our opinions.”
As a former student of Wedgwood Elementary School, as well as a Chestnut Ridge Middle School alumna, Cleary said the path she has taken has changed her views of the world.
“My whole life has been here in Washington Township,” Cleary said. “Hardship or success, it has been because of Township.”
She said she will miss the teachers who have had a profound impact on her as a person and as a student, as well as the friends and adventures that came with growing up in Washington Township her entire life.
“We can think of ourselves as the homegrown products of Township, seeds not yet blossomed,” Cleary said at graduation. “From this day on, we decide whether our descendants will feel the prickles of our thorns, or if our part in history will be a garden of all things beautiful.”
With dreams of becoming a pediatric nurse practitioner and studying abroad as a nurse in Africa, Cleary is headed to the College of New Jersey to study nursing in the honors program. She said wherever life takes her, that is where she will go.
