Story by Mike Weland, Photos by Mike Weland, Katie Banning, Piper Banning, Patty Beckle, Carol Graham
Every graduating class in the history of Bonners Ferry High School has its own character, its own feel. Each class is unique in its time, in its mix of personalities and talents and accomplishment, leavened by the way the teachers and staff relate and respond to the dynamic of the unique quirks and foibles that swirl and eddy like the surface of a hot cup of coffee, Brownian motion subtly ensuring the beauty of uncertainty, the eternal element of surprise.
The 2025 graduating class saw much uncertainty lean in its favor, with graduates who played on the first ever state champion basketball team last year as juniors wondering if they had the magic to do it again answered with a resounding “yes.”
And on Saturday, they carried out the ritual, the rite of graduation. Stepping across a line of demarcation. The satisfaction of their accomplishment suddenly tinged with the dawning awareness that a journey that began for most with trepidation about 12 years ago is ended with no possibility of returning. No turning away from the uncertainty, the possibilities, that stretch like a vast panorama before them.
Some have an idea where they’ll first set foot on the mountain that rises before them; college, travel, a job, the military, a family, the future to which they aspire fixed in their mind and pursued with ambition. Others will float on the breeze, see what opportunities, what challenges, await them.
“I encourage you to always explore the unknown … why would you wonder when you can know?” Sydney Beckle, senior class president and valedictorian, challenged.
Neither camp nor the variations thereof are right or wrong, merely different, and a good and worthy life can arise from either approach, just as each approach carries with it the same risks, the same happenstance that assails some with inordinate affliction and sorrow while some seem to go through life unscathed.
But there is one truth by which every graduate in this year’s Bonners Ferry High School is bound — a truth that every graduate to earn a diploma in this amazing community has discovered or is in the process of discovering.
While you can never go back, you can likewise never detach yourself from that singular yet diverse group of people brought together by little more than their dates of birth and where they lived at the beginning of each school year.
No matter how far each drifts from home, if at all, they will be gently bound as if by gossamer, not quite family but close. News will reach them of misfortune befalling a classmate and their ache will be real, their well wishes sincere.
“Nostalgia is proof that you are living a life worth remembering,” said Salutatorian Morgan Tye. “Clarity does not come with force.”
Few in the Bonners Ferry High School Class of ’25 are giving much thought to class reunions, they do get an opportunity for an early start just over a month from now as Kootenai River Days and the BFHS All-Class Reunion merge to put the community in an exceptionally festive mood July 17-10.
Congratulations to each of this year’s graduates. May your travels take you everywhere you want to go and your aspirations stretch you beyond what you thought possible and take you to heights you never dreamt possible.
School resource officer Jason Trujillo, guest speaker chosen by the Class of 2025, put it succinctly:
“You will forever be a part of my story,” he told them.
GO, BADGERS, GO!
