Class of 2016 honored at Senior Awards Night

Senior Thomas Zheng poses with the Rotary Scholarship Cup, awarded for having the highest cumulative GPA.

By Laura Bock,
BlueDevilHUB.com Editor–

“He’s your ASB president, this student rocks, put your hands together for Teddy Knox.” So ended the rap portion of English teacher and Student Government adviser Anthony Vasquez’s speech, in which he awarded senior Teddy Knox the Associated Student Body Special Award.

Knox and more than 200 other members of the DHS class of 2016 were honored at the Senior Awards Night on Tuesday, May 31 at the Richard Brunelle Performance Hall. Awards received by seniors included community scholarships, memorial scholarships, outside scholarships from colleges and organizations, recognition from specific faculties, and other special awards and honors.

According to Principal William Brown, the seniors combined to win more than $1 million in scholarship money.

“This is the time to celebrate excellence in academics, excellence in leadership, excellence in service and excellence in personal character,” Brown said.

After Brown spoke, Career Center coordinator Julie Clayton introduced the community scholarships, which seniors received from organizations such as the Girl Scouts, the DHS PTA, Kiwanis Club and Sutter Davis.

Following the community scholarships were the memorial scholarships.

Most notably among the memorial scholarships, senior Andi Jackson was awarded the John Barovetto Memorial Award by family member Pat Barovetto. Barovetto spoke about John, who was a 1956 DHS graduate who served in the Vietnam War. After being killed in battle, John Barovetto has had a hall in Fort Knox, Ky. and a park in Davis named after him, and was also inducted into the DHS Hall of Fame in 2010.

Barovetto then transitioned into talking about Jackson, who will be playing Division-I field hockey at Indiana University in the fall.

“John would’ve been honored to have you receive this award, Andi,” Barovetto said. “Thank you for your courage and dedication.”

Later on in the evening, following the outside scholarships and faculty awards, Knox gave a speech after receiving his award from Vasquez. In his speech, Knox talked about the importance of turning failures into valuable learning experiences.

“[Failures] can be useless, or they can be valuable,” he said. “In order to make failures valuable, you need those two things: you need someone to tell us that we failed, and we need someone to tell us how to improve.”

After Knox’s speech, seniors Anna Belenis, Nick Borowsky, Jessica Boyers, Thomas Hart and Robert Hughes were awarded the Triple “D” Award for earning three varsity letters their senior year. Seniors Ryan Kreidler and Fiona O’Keeffe also earned the title of Athletes of the Year.

Finance office secretary Cheryl Ozga was honored as the Classified Employee of the Year, art teacher Lynnette Diem won Teacher of the Year and English teacher Carrie Pilon won the Floyd Fenocchio Memorial Educator of the Year Award.

The last two awards, the Rotary Scholarship Cup and the Gordon H. True Service Cup, were the most anticipated of the evening.

Senior Thomas Zheng won the Rotary Scholarship Cup, which is awarded to the student “who is at the top of their class scholastically, based on weighted grades.”

Zheng said that he worked hard to win the award by studying and taking classes outside of school, leading to his cumulative GPA of 4.659.

He said that he actually knows all the recipients of the cup from the past three years, and remembered attending his brother’s Senior Awards Night, where he admired a similar award.

“I thought at that point, in ninth grade, ‘I’m going to work my hardest to get this award’ and I knew it was really cutthroat–there were a lot of other students that I know who were extremely competent and extremely talented in school, but I guess in the end I managed it,” he said.

He also mentioned that his friend whom he met in his sophomore Chemistry class, Thomas Lloyd, was second place to him in the running for the award.

“He’s a really, really talented student, and honestly, if there’s anyway just as deserving, if not more deserving of the award, it’d be him,” Zheng said. “He’s really smart–he’s pushed me, I’ve pushed him. We’ve had our times where we’ve both studied extremely hard to see who would get the better score. Sometimes he’d win, sometimes I’d win, sometimes we’d tie, but he’s helped me a lot and he’s a really great friend.”

The last award of the night, the Gordon H. True Service Cup, is awarded to one boy and one girl based on their loyalty and citizenship. The recipients were seniors Eric Smith and Gabi Ramer.

“I think I won this award based on my efforts that I have contributed to this school, not because I did it for the reasons of wanting to get recognition, but because of the selfless acts that I hope to pursue in my everyday life,” Smith said. “I value helping others and I find it very critical and important to help those in need, and to help anyone out there who is in a different situation than myself.”

Ramer said she had a feeling that it could possibly be her “because I got a letter from the Career Center saying ‘make sure you’re on stage,’ but I wasn’t entirely sure what the whole process was. But I was very surprised to hear my name.”

Ramer mentioned her participation in both Link Crew and the LEAD class, as well as her position as the Friendship Day president, as factors that could have influenced the selectors.

“I definitely think that my participation in Friendship Day has helped me become a better person, and also made me more aware of the things on campus that I can do to make campus a better place,” she said.