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For Beloit Turner grads, the sky’s the limit

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Beloit Turner Graduation

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BELOIT — The past, the present and the future, all rolled into one hour of celebration.

On Saturday, 90 Beloit Turner High School seniors walked across the gym and received their diplomas and the applause of friends, families and teachers.

Then and now

Valedictorian Janessa Snippen noted how the time seemed to fly between kindergarten and senior year. She recalled their time together as “’90s kids” and encouraged them not to let the future slip by as quickly.

“Mark Twain said, ‘Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do,’” Snippen told her classmates.

Both she and salutatorian Megan Zandler encouraged classmates to embrace the world and all its possibilities. College, military service, tech school and life itself are all opportunities to keep learning.

As Twain once said, “I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.”

Music history

After the valedictorian’s address, the Turner band played a medley of John Lennon’s 1971 hit “Imagine” and Kool & The Gang’s 1981 hit “Celebration.”

The graduates, who were born in the 1990s, stood up to dance.

Advice for old, young

Student speakers punctuated their speeches with encouraging quotes from Twain, President Theodore Roosevelt, poet Ralph Waldo Emerson and L. Ron Hubbard, founder of the Church of Scientology.

The speeches also were laced with messages reflecting the untrammeled hopes of the young. Adults might scoff, but they might do better to follow the advice of graduating seniors, as those ideas hold a key to happiness.

Advice included: Don’t be afraid to take chances, embrace all of life’s possibilities, be yourself and finally, “the sky’s the limit and don’t limit yourself to the sky.”