I've recently been featuring graduation speeches by local high school students on my blog. Today's speech is by Jessa Johnson of Urbana High School. She gave the speech at Urbana's graduation ceremony May 27, 2012.

I am hoping to share graduation speeches from a variety of high school students on this blog, and today's is from Sarah Zola of Centennial High School. She gave the speech May 22, 2012.

I wrote a story for today's paper about Champaign high schools requiring all its students to read at least one book this summer.

The school district sent me PDF files of the three lists with suggested titles for each class. (Juniors have their choice of two books.) Here are links to those PDF files on our website.

Here's the text of the graduation speech delivered by Christina Kohlmann of The High School of St. Thomas More. She's the valedictorian of the Class of 2012, and spoke at the ceremony May 20, 2012.

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Here's the text of the graduation speech delivered by Joseph Song of Uni High in Urbana. Uni's graduation ceremony was Saturday, May 19.

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I wrote a story for Saturday's paper about Ben's Bells, which are windchimes handmade by local students, encouraging local residents to be intentionally kind.