2018 Clarke Central High School graduates Rebecca Barker (left) and Michael Morris (right) participate in the Senior Walk on April 26, 2018. The Senior Walk is one of four events taking place on April 22 this year to celebrate the senior class. “We want the seniors to be excited, inspired, motivated, ready to meet the real world with enthusiasm, and they need to be planning. They need to have these thoughts in their mind: ‘I am no longer a child, I am now an adult.’ So we want them to grow up, but this is to give them a party also,” fine arts department teacher and Glads Rise Up! coordinator Dr. Eunice Kang said. Photo by Krista Shumaker
Glads Rise Up! and Decision Day, two events meant to celebrate the senior class, will take place on April 22.
On April 22, Clarke Central High School seniors will participate in a field trip called Glads Rise Up! The event, which will begin at 9:00 a.m. at the Cotton Press, consists of a series of activities leading up to Decision Day, which will take place at 2:15 p.m on the same day.
The event, which was previously scheduled for April 26, was rescheduled due to a conflict with the venue.
“The Cotton Press was mistakenly booked on the original date (that Glads Rise Up! was scheduled), but now we have the Cotton Press for April 22,” fine arts department teacher Dr. Eunice Kang said.
Kang volunteered to coordinate the event due to her participation on the CCHS Local School Governance Team (LSGT) and is looking forward to the opportunities presented to seniors.
“(The event) involves a reality store, which has financial and just daily living issues that (seniors) need to think about and address: leasing a car, renting an apartment, opening a bank account, signing up for insurance, ‘adulting,’” Kang said. “Mock interviews will be the other session that they’ll rotate with, and those will be with local business leaders and community leaders.”
According to Kang, Glads Rise Up! will include a senior breakfast, a guest speaker, the reality store, a photo booth, a catered lunch and a musical artist. Following this, students will return to CCHS for Decision Day festivities.
“We have a musical artist to be announced — mystery musical artist. It’s gonna be awesome. And then, photo booth, which was by far the biggest hit last year. The line was out the door, but we’re going to make that after the educational sessions,” Kang said. “Then we’ll load buses, return to (CCHS) for cap and gown distribution and senior walk from Mell (Auditorium) to the New Gym, and parents will congregate outside the New Gym to cheer on the students as they walk.”
Senior Amari Manago is excited to participate in the event and for her future college endeavors.
“I’m starting at Georgia Southern,” Manago said. “I’m looking forward to seeing where everybody is going to go, like all my friends, and just seeing how we’ve all grown up together.”
Kang believes this year’s Glads Rise Up! event will be an improvement to last year’s.
“(Last year,) they passed out cap and gown first thing, and that ended up being a little too chaotic because then we were really late getting on the buses to go to the event, so we lost a lot of time in the actual sessions, and the schedule got messed up,” Kang said. “We have tweaked many aspects of it to make it even more effective and relevant for them from last year, so we got really good feedback from the students and the teachers last year on how to improve.”
