Our responsibilities to graduates

Friday 60 La Conner High School students graduate, a great accomplishment and the real start, certainly not the end, of their education.

Four times editorials on this page have saluted and extolled La Conner’s graduates, lifting them up as the hope of the world, pointing out the monumental challenges all adults are facing and extolling them to be brave and sensitive and thoughtful and to peer into the future to find a sane, sustainable world that their elders have refused to grasp.

Not this year. This year, it is graduates, be aware. High schoolers already know too much of the present moment is not to their liking, does not make sense, is not what they want to step into, much less inherit.

Bright hopes and optimism is their due. What can be finer than entering the independence of being an adult and reaching for new opportunities and to look forward to bright possibilities?

But not this year, not now and seemingly not anywhere, including here. Violence and death is everywhere on the news, from the Russian invasion of Ukraine to mass shootings weekly, daily, cascading from Buffalo through Uvalde to Tulsa, Philadelphia and Chattanooga.

And now, in La Conner’s high school two students have been arrested and booked into Skagit County Juvenile Detention on counts of felony harassment threats to kill. Columbine, Sandy Hook, El Paso, Uvalde can be any town USA. It can be here.

So, rather than project the changes and advancements these teens will make in the society they are emerging into, this is a challenge that they find the courage to say “no” and “stop” to their parents and figures of authority.

Rather than write to this year’s graduates, this is a challenge to parents and adults in the community: How are you – we – supporting teens as they grow and transition into adulthood?

Staff of the La Conner School District seek to instill being kind and brave throughout the school community. But it is the parents and surrounding adults that need to be kind, brave, sensitive and thoughtful. The approaches some are taking, to harden schools and arm adults, what examples do these set? They show hearts that are hardened and people that are afraid and that the preparation for protection is to respond with violence.

It is the adults who have to consider the lives they are still creating and are responsible for. There is not time to wait for teens to figure out how to clean up the messes we have made, move us into the future of their dreams. In this present moment, as La Conner’s graduation commences, as summer starts, what will adults do with all the resources, experiences and smarts we have to reduce the desperation and fear that generate hostility, hate and violence?

Adults cannot wait for teens to figure this out or to grow into leadership to show the way to alternatives. The list of woes is long and there are many messes to clean up.

Fortunately, School Superintendent Will Nelson modeled kind humanity, telling high schoolers at an assembly Tuesday, "I love every one of you here, I care about every one of you here.” There is no better starting point than that.

Parents, grandparents, elders in teens lives, this editorial is for you.