West Ranch High School celebrated its 19th annual graduation ceremony Monday, with 208 of the 449 graduates donning golden robes as honor scholars, students with a 4.0 or higher grade-point average through their first seven semesters.
Principal Robert Fisher’s commencement speech noted how the “wide-eyed freshmen” arrived on the campus at the same time as he did four years ago, a time since that has been filled with times that were “challenging, joyful and deeply memorable,” he said.
“Now, in my time as principal, I’ve only had one class manage to leave a car running in the parking lot during the school day — though we won’t mention any names regarding whose car that was or which staff member made sure to safely go out and turn it off,” he said, sharing some of the “pranks and laughs” from the last four years. “I’ve only had two classes brave enough to ask me to get into a dunk tank, but only one class had the skill and the luck to consistently drop me in the water. That, of course, was the class of 2026.”
Aileen Kwan, a golden-robed senior and the student body president, called her graduation day a surreal experience from the podium, after the past four years.
While every book, show and movie romanticize and dramatically portray one’s high school years, she also recalled a certain monotony. Sometimes, the school year can feel like a football games-homecoming-prom-and-repeat cycle, she said.
But what stood out was not the “same faces, the same path … the same wooden desk,” every student knows as part of their daily high school experience. And maybe that’s the point, she said.
“It was the two minutes before class, full of inside jokes, pre-exam panic, and nothing conversations that somehow meant everything. It was the dreaded seating chart that led to the most unexpected friendships. And it was the Tuesday afternoon in AP human geography, when I finally looked up after bombing a unit test to find a classmate’s notes already waiting on my desk, no explanation needed. All these memories … don’t just disappear into thin air once we graduate, but they linger in the halls we walk,” Kwan said.
Rohan Radharaj talked about how he came to West Ranch as a junior after time at two other high schools, but he never felt out of place, and instead received valuable mentorship from his teachers and classmates. His time at speech and debate was especially formative, he said, as he finished with a rousing call from Revolutionary War-era writer Thomas Paine, “We have it in our power to begin the world over again, and so as we enter this world, let’s enter with the intention to build something new, to build something great.”
Another commencement speaker, graduating senior Aiden Jojo, asked his parents to stand as he thanked them for their help in making him the man he is today: “A man who can fight any challenge head-on, a man who can take responsibility for his actions, and a man who still needs some help doing his laundry.”
He shared the most clarifying piece of advice he received, which ironically came from another sea of yellow and blue that he’d seen before, the Disney characters from the “Minions” movies.
The advice? “Banana.”
“I know, I know, it doesn’t make much sense, but that’s kind of the point. Not everything in life is going to be perfectly planned or perfectly understood, and West Ranch has shown us exactly that over the past four years,” he said. “Sometimes, all you need is the courage to take the next step, even if all you can say is, ‘banana.’”
