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NeoCity Academy’s inaugural graduates receive applause from family and friends near the end of Friday’s commencement at the Silver Spurs Arena. PHOTO/KEN JACKSON
A week-long celebration of the Class of 2022 last week at the Silver Spurs Arena finished with those who were first.
The 99 graduates of NeoCity Academy – those who were freshmen when the school opened in portables across U.S. Highway 192 at Gateway High School – took the stage Friday evening to receive diplomas. They donned hoods emblazoned with “Inaugural Class.”
It was not lost on principal Michael Meechin that those students – dubbed “The Launch Class” – took a risk on a school just opening at the Osceola County hi-tech campus with methods and tracks that hadn’t been tested yet.
“For me, this is a full-circle moment I’ve waited four years for,” Meechin said. “We began this journey with a lot of unknowns – no name, no building, no staff. Together, here we are to celebrate those who took this journey. Many believed we were some newfangled idea; they believed school should not be fun, or not value on student voice. We heard it all from our critics.
“The world we graduate into is far more complex than it was five minutes ago. That’s the pace of iteration, and schools need to keep up. I stand here with 99 examples of what the outcomes of setting out to change the world can look like.”
The end product was a class that earned nearly $8 million in scholarships. Over half earned Cum Laude honors or higher with a weighted 3.8 GPA, half graduated as AP Scholars (passing three or more Advanced Placement exams) and two-thirds earned the state’s Bright Futures scholarship. Students will be going on to Top 100 colleges like Georgia Tech, Howard University, Columbia, Cornell, Carnegie-Mellon and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.)
The graduation rate of the Class of ‘22? One hundred percent.
Meechin noted these seniors worked on projects with AdventHealth, Blue Origin, NASA, imec and Skywater USA – the latter firms doing research within the broader NeoCity tech farm.
Senior Class President Abdurrahman Bejjaj said this class of NeoCity trailblazers “changed the status quo of what a school is, and can be.”
“These were four special years, four difficult years,” he said, channeling challenges of both the school’s intensive project-based STEM tracks and the COVID-19 pandemic that put its fingerprints on two school years. “We learned how to adapt, overcome, fall down and get up to engineer our own paths of success and see positive solutions. We are now 99 rays of hope.”
And they will always be The Launch Class.
