If All You Need is Love, the members of the St. Luke’s Class of 2017 passed their final exams with flying colours.
“In the Beatles discography, the world love is mentioned 617 times,” said Dylan Sinclair, vice-principal at St. Luke’s Outreach Centre said during the school’s graduation ceremony May 24 at St. James Church.
The reason I say this, is because I can’t think of a single day that I haven’t heard the world love or seen the word love every day that I have been at St. Luke’s. That word is going to be said 50 or 60 times today and tonight because that is what our school is based on.”
St. Luke’s Outreach Centre is an alternative school which offers both on-line and a classroom setting for students who have opted not to go to a traditional school.
Love – and her own smarts – were two of the reasons Kirsten Powell, who gave the Class of 2017 graduation address, did so well at St. Luke’s.
Powell said she felt alone at traditional schools.
“I needed a different scenery and different surroundings,” Powell said in an interview. “You walk in (to St. Luke’s) and everyone is welcome. The staff and students are like: ‘I don’t know who you are or what you have been through, but you are welcomed here. We love you and we care about you and we are going to do what we can to get you back to being you.’”
She admitted hearing the word love was strange at a school.
“At first I was a little weirded out,” she said with a laugh. “I kept my distance — how are these people so nice?
“But in the end it is just ‘Wow’. The people do care, because we all know what it is like to feel left out.”
Powell did have some ties to traditional schools. She was a member of the Foothills Athletic Council champion Holy Trinity Academy Knights’ girls basketball team.
(In her graduation address, Powell mentions the word ‘love’)
Graduate Teagen Hakl surprised himself by graduating early. School was like cutting the lawn, he had to get around to it sooner or later.
“School was always something that I wanted to get out of the way,” the 17-year-old Hakl said. “I always had things I wanted to do, travelling, and stuff like that and school was the one thing holding me back.”
He got a motivational lift from St. Luke’s.
“Just the loving, helping heart and hand that St. Luke’s gives everyone is just that much more motivation to graduate,” Hakl said. “It’s nice to have a little of family there to help you.”
Not that it was easy.
“When I first came to St. Luke’s I didn’t go to school for a month at a time – I was just so out of it, I didn’t feel I was worth enough to graduate,” Hakl said. “The teachers were telling me I could do it, and were always pushing me to reach my potential…. I am now actually graduating early.”
