By Joseph Curtatone

(The opinions and views expressed in the commentaries and letters to the Editor of The Somerville Times belong solely to the authors and do not reflect the views or opinions of The Somerville Times, its staff or publishers)

“No doubt it ain’t easy, but we got teachings,” goes the chorus of Somerville High School’s 2016 class song. Boy, did you ever! Few classes exemplify the school motto “Honor and Progress” as well as the 270 young women and men who received their SHS diplomas this week.

I congratulate you and your parents and guardians on reaching this milestone. You’ve brought honor to Somerville through your progress, and there has been much progress to tout.

In your four years here, Somerville High has made enormous increases in academic performance on the MCAS tests. I have to give credit to your teachers and administrators, but you took the tests and, as the school song goes, “Somerville leads the way.”

Somerville public schools had made steady gains in the MCAS in recent years, but shot up dramatically during your SHS tenure. In your freshman year, SHS leapfrogged two levels on the state’s accountability scale, moving it up to Level 1 for the first time in the school’s history. The next year, your growth measured against other schools with at least 1,000 students was phenomenal. And last year, you did it again. A student growth percentile score of 40 is considered to be moderate, but SHS scored a 77 in English language arts and a 69 in math. If you were to examine a bar chart of your progress, you’d think you were looking at a staircase going up.

Test scores are merely one measure of your collective success. The Career and Technical Education program has a 99 percent placement rate for your class of 2016. Eighty-two of this year’s graduating seniors – that’s about 30 percent of you – qualified for the John and Abigail Adams Award, making this the largest amount of qualifying students in any one graduating class in the school’s history. You have a National Merit Scholar, a prestigious national award, among your ranks. You’ve earned countless academic and athletic accolades, awards, and championships over the course of your Somerville Public Schools career which, when added up among all of the graduates, spans about 600,000 total days in school. That’s a lot of learning, and you have a lot to show for it.

You also helped make the world a smaller place through your travels, including the first trip to Cuba by Somerville students since 1959.

Many of you will attend college locally (including MIT, Tufts, Wellesley, and Harvard), while others are off to colleges throughout the continental United States — places like Ithaca College, Swarthmore, UC-Davis, and Barnard.  A few of you have chosen to take advantage of a gap year by joining a program called Year Up, where you’ll work for tech and finance companies and earn college credits as well as money. The Somerville High class of 2016 will be represented in all five branches of the armed forces. Some will build on the excellent vocational training you received at our Career and Technical Education department. Others will begin earning a living by immediately entering the workforce.

Your diploma marks the end of your schooling in Somerville, but it’s certainly not the end of your learning. You will use the skills you learned in the last 12 years for the rest of your life. Expand on them. Learn from people with experience, just as others will learn from you as you get older. Think of problems as puzzles you can solve.

SHS was a big community for you. Find new ones, either through work or college or your hometown. As you go through life, you’ll realize the importance of building and maintaining communities. Make connections and keep them, and they’ll serve you well.

I’m proud of the knowledge that Somerville High has given you for the next journey in your life, wherever it takes you. I wish you all the best of luck. I encourage you to make waves and messes wherever you go. You’ll learn from your mistakes. I realize that not all of you will remain in Somerville. Should you decide to spread your wings, don’t let Somerville leave you.