West High valedictorian uses speech to call attention to teenagers lost to school shootings, police violence and COVID-19

Josie Albertson-Grove, The New Hampshire Union Leader, Manchester
·2 min read

Jun. 12—Manchester's West High School celebrated the class of 2021 on Saturday, with a ceremony that celebrated the small school and recognized the particular struggles of this year's graduating class.

After other class officers and speakers spoke and sang songs about their burgeoning nostalgia for Manchester High School West and their gratitude for the education they had received, valedictorian Seanna Kelly talked about the teenagers who should also be graduating this year.

On Valentine's Day of their freshman year, Kelly remembered, she and her classmates opened their phones to see the news of the shooting at a Parkland, Fla., high school. A girl the same age as Kelly died after she was shot 10 times. Another ninth-grader was shot in the back and died trying to run away. They should be graduating this year, Kelly said.

A few months later, Kelly remembered, a 15-year-old boy, Jordan Edwards, was killed by a police officer in Texas. The officer was later convicted of murder, she said, but she said Jordan Edwards should have been graduating this year too.

Then last fall, COVID-19 killed a healthy Chicago teenager, Sarah Simental. She, and the other teenagers who died from the virus, should be graduating with the class of 2021.

The losses were personal too, Kelly said. Her parents lost their jobs last year. Her grandfather died. And for the whole class of 2021, senior year was nothing like the senior year they thought they would have.

"We have been taught to grieve those we have lost," Kelly said.

Living through the pandemic has made young people more empathetic than they were, Kelly said. Young people learned to put others' needs before their own, as they worked to keep loved ones safe by sacrificing some rites of adolescent passage.

Trappings of normalcy returned in the spring, as students came back to class at the high school on Notre Dame Avenue. Sports were back, and students danced at their senior proms.

Graduation was outdoors instead of in the Southern New Hampshire University arena, but unlike last year, students' entire families could attend — and take their masks off.

But Kelly said the class would be forever marked by the pandemic, the protests against police violence and the specter of school shootings.

"Don't be blind to what happens around you," she said. "And don't be afraid to stand up to injustice."