RCHS Speakers Offer Their Advice At Graduation
On the day hundreds of students bid a fond farewell to their high school careers, the weather threatened to put a damper on the excitement.
Rain had escalated throughout the day Thursday, May 22, darkening the pavement around Virginia Military Institute’s Cameron Hall and sending thousands of friends, family members, faculty and alumni of Rockbridge County High School trudging under umbrellas and awnings. But local police managed traffic in the downpour, strangers held doors for each other and inside, the raindrops were all but forgotten.
The joy was immediate and insistent: audible in the reunions happening up and down the bleachers, and visible in the embraces between parents who recognized teachers from years of school events. When the 219 members of the class of 2026 began their processional to the RCHS band’s slow, repeating arrangement of “Pomp and Circumstance,” most of the crowd rose to their feet and stayed there.
Cameron Hall holds roughly 5,000. On this particular Thursday, despite some lingering empty chairs at the top, it felt full.
The ceremony proceeded through the Pledge of Allegiance, led by Nicolas Vargas of the VMI class of 2029, and the National Anthem performed by the RCHS band, before Senior Class President Ella Cate Brown took the podium for the evening’s welcome address.
Brown, whose mother has been a teacher in the Rockbridge County school system for 17 years, opened by acknowledging the teachers and staff who had guided the class across its entire education — from elementary school through high school.
“From our kindergarten days, where some of you taught us our letters, to our high school math classes, where we were mostly confused, you’ve been patient and helpful, and we will carry the lessons you’ve taught us with us for the rest of our days,” Brown said.
She anchored her remarks around a piece of advice her mother has offered every morning for as long as she can remember: “do great and be great.” It’s a phrase, Brown said, that had shaped her approach to each day, including the hard ones, and one she urged her classmates to carry with them.
“The people around you aren’t going to remember what you did,” she said, “but they’re going to remember the impact that you made.”
Principal Shaun Sparks followed with an address to the class, framing graduation not as a finish line but as a beginning, as the close of one chapter and the opening of another. He offered four directives to the graduates: be curious, be kind, be courageous, and remember where you came from. The last of those carried particular weight in a room where so many people clearly already did.
Salutatorian Corinna Kathleen Allen, who opened her remarks by joking that receiving that title essentially meant she “got an extra assignment and a gold-colored medal,” delivered a speech that moved between self-deprecating humor and genuine warmth. She described the shared texture of the RCHS experience — the locker that jammed on the first day of freshman year and never opened again, the eHall passes, the late-night studying — as evidence of something real: a community that had grown together even when it didn’t entirely realize it was happening.
She quoted Winston Churchill (“If you’re going through hell, keep going”) and offered her classmates a deliberately understated sendoff in the form of parental advice: wash your hands, wear sunscreen, look both ways before you cross the street, be kind. “Preferably,” she added, “be more kind than you were in high school.”
The valedictory address came from Liam James Stillwell, a warm and engaging presence whose speech took an unexpected detour through Austrian economics. The concept he landed on was time preference theory — the idea that people generally prefer things sooner rather than later — which Stillwell used as a framework for talking about intentionality. Time, he argued, is the only truly nonrenewable resource. It can’t be stored, transferred or recovered. Every hour spent mindlessly scrolling before a calculus exam is an hour that compounds against you; every hour spent deliberately (practicing a skill, building toward a goal, investing in a relationship) compounds in your favor.
“Your hours, your lives, are far too precious to let slip away,” Stillwell told his classmates. “Be intentional. Use time to progress, instead of regress.”
He acknowledged the questions he couldn’t answer — whether the school’s J-lot would ever be repaired, what the community would look like in 10 years — but expressed confidence in the people around him to face them well. He closed, as he had begun, with warmth: “Even though the sounds of RCHS bells and Wildcats may fade into memory, spend every moment intentionally, and be the best version of yourself that you can be.”
In the crowd, graduates wore the colorful cords and stoles that have become a visual language of accomplishment at Rockbridge County commencements. Purple cords marked students with grade point averages of 4.0 or above; gold for 3.50 to 3.99; white stoles for National Honor Society. Others marked membership in Future Business Leaders of America, the Family Career and Community Leaders of America, the school’s yearbook staff, the music department, theater, art, veterinary science, blood donation. Taken together, the regalia told the story of four years of choices — what students had joined, pursued, led, and given back.
Outside, the rain kept falling. Inside Cameron Hall, 219 Rockbridge County graduates, one by one, walked across a stage and into their futures.
AMONG THE SCENES at Thursday’s Rockbridge County High School graduation were (above) Cassandra Silver blowing a kiss as she walks across the stage to receive her diploma; (at left) Chase Kelly checking out his diploma; (at top left) Lillian Woody hugging a classmate after the ceremony; and (at bottom of page) seniors switching over their tassels to signify their official transition to graduates. (Stephanie Mikels Blevins photos)
KALEB ASHCRAFT participates in the Pledge of Allegiance. (Stephanie Mikels Blevins photo)
