Each year since our founding, we have used a one-word description for the graduating class that year from America’s high schools, and this year—with its sexual harassment protests, its gun-control and school-safety marches, and its statewide teachers’ strikes—we have dubbed this year’s graduates the “Walkout Class of 2018,” and we extend to them our most heartfelt congratulations on their accomplishments this and next month in the nationwide march across high school stages that forever marks the time.
As students look forward over the horizon, we pray they remain active and engaged and that they develop into informed citizen of the communities they will now enter. The promising events of this year seem to suggest they’ll do all of those things. We wish them well and hope to hear from them about their school journeys and their community service as they embark.
The US Department of Education projected that about 3.6 million students will graduate from high school this month and next month, with about 315,000 of those graduating from private high schools. Earlier this year, they walked out, and now they step up.