• 
• CLASS
• JOBS
• AUTO
• HOMES

Parkview High School's 'class of farmers' graduates

Photo Gallery

Graduation Blitz

Photos from high school graduations around southern Wisconsin.

View Gallery

ORFORDVILLE — Parkview High School valedictorian Rita Breneman had a quick response when asked what the Class of 2011 will be remembered for in Orfordville.

"Excessive farmerness," she said. "We drive trucks, and most of them wear farm boots to school daily. We are a true class from a farming town."

Even salutatorian Mackenzie Nickels worked a poem about the cost of a cow into her address to the class. The "basic cow" ended up costing much more because of all the "add-ons," such as an automatic fertilizer attachment and automatic fly swatter, she described.

The parents in the audience probably didn't figure it would cost more than $200,000 to raise their graduates from birth to age 18, Nickels said.

While change was the only constant in the graduates' lives, she told her classmates to make their own decisions and do what they love to do.

Her speech concluded with what many were thinking: "We're finally done with senioritis."

The Parkview Class of 2011 graduated Sunday afternoon under bright sunshine in the stadium behind their junior/senior high school.

"This group, all of them, made it, every single one—we had 100 percent," Principal Bill Trow said of the 75 graduates. "Just that in itself was an accomplishment."

Several students showed maturity and persistence to make it to the ceremony, he said. In her speech, Breneman reviewed what her classmates encountered in the 16,536 hours they spent in school since starting kindergarten in 1998.

She called out her fellow graduates by name for their skills in how to write a paper on deadline or how to sneak into class late without getting noticed.

But the biggest thing students learned was how to learn, she said. They will walk out of the ceremony not only with diplomas, but with memories and the skills needed for life, she said.

Kaelee Thostenson had been waiting for this ceremony for 13 years, she said.

"It's finally come," she said with a big smile after the ceremony.

She plans to attend Edgewood College for nursing.

Her class will leave being known as the "class of farmers," she said, because of their big trucks and tractors.

As graduates and their families left Parkview, those big trucks revved their engines in the parking lot one last time.