High school graduation season is upon us. Across Aurora’s two school districts, friends and family will gather to celebrate this milestone as young people move on to the next stage of their lives.
Each student has their own unique story, their own achievements and their own struggles. To recognize this graduation season, the Sentinel has sat down with two exceptional students, one from Cherry Creek School District and one from Aurora Public Schools. These two students have not just succeeded in the classroom, but they’ve made an impact on their classmates and are driven to continue making an impact on the world.
Taylor Heap – Cherokee Trail High School, Cherry Creek School District
Taylor Heap is not at a loss for accomplishments to brag about during her four years at Cherokee Trail High School. The 18-year-old is one of 17 valedictorians at Cherokee Trail, an accomplished athlete, International Baccalaureate student, Boettcher Scholar, winner of the Cherry Creek School District’s Golden Heart Award and Cherokee Trail’s Outstanding Senior Female Award winner.
Portrait by Philip B. Poston/The Sentinel
But ask Heap what she’s most proud of during her scholastic career up to this point, and the energetic senior is quick to talk about her work helping found the Special Olympics Peer Partners Club and leading a campaign to end the R Word, which seeks to stop students from using developmental differences as an insult. Heap said her passion to end the R word stems in large part from her growing up with friends and neighbors of all different abilities and her time in a unified art class.
“What was so great was that integration of students from the general education and the special education programs and coming together. And what was really amazing was I made so many incredible friendships,” Heap said. “After I took that class it made me really want to spread that experience to other people so they can have similar experiences and grow as people themselves.”
Since that unified art class and her work to create the Special Olympics club, she has been an active participant in unified sports, cheerleading and other activities that work to integrate students of all abilities. For Heap, inclusion isn’t just about equal opportunities, it’s about equal access and the bringing together of people.
“No matter who you are, you feel welcome and represented and you feel love and belong somewhere. That’s what makes something inclusive,” heap said. “That sense of belonging and feeling like you belong here and you’re wanted here.”
Heap, who was diagnosed with a genetic disorder her sophomore year, said her time in the unified activities has not only put things into perspective for her, but inspired her to tackle her issues with the same positivity her peers kept when dealing with their own issues.
“It made me realize I’m so lucky to have the life that I have. There are students here, my friends, that have conditions that are far worse and what they have to go through every single day is much more than what I go through every day,” Heap said. “I should be thankful because all of the kids, no matter what’s going on in their own personal life, they’re happy and they want to be outgoing and friendly and their life doesn’t revolve around their condition.”
Heap is set to head off to Colorado State University where she plans to take a dual degree program that’s biomedical engineering and biological and chemical engineering. She said for her, the idea that she could study for the rest of her life and not know everything there is to know about those fields is why she is so passionate about them.
“It’s a field that’s based on learning and it’s always growing and it’s always changing. Nothing is ever constant in that field,” Heap said. “I get bored easily. If I do something for a long time and there’s nothing changing about it, I’m done with it. I want to do something else. So I want to go into a career where I’m constantly challenging myself and changing the preconceived notions in my head.”
Abel Negussie – Rangeview High School, Aurora Public Schools
For weeks before Abel Negussie was set to address his fellow graduates at Rangeview High School graduation as the school’s salutatorian, he was hard at work trying to find the right words for his message.
The 18-year-old senior, set to attend Yale University in the fall, wanted his classmates to understand the important work they had done standing up for their rights, whether it was demanding more funding for education, stronger gun control or protesting the deaths of people of color at the hands of law enforcement. It was a lesson he wanted to make sure they wouldn’t forget as they moved onto the next stage of their life.
“The reason I think it’s important to participate in these things is because since we’re going to be the next generation of leaders in the country, I think it’s important to be aware of the issue and not just affected by them,” Negussie said. “It’s important for (my classmates and I) to advocate for themselves because no one is going to vouch for them as much as they’re going to do it for themselves.
“Even though we’re high schoolers and we’re kids, we can still make an impact and we have a voice.”
While Negussie might have been nervous about making sure he found the right words, he isn’t a stranger to writing. He and his friends have been making beats and rapping for several years under the name Young Kingz, with Negussie going by the moniker Arex. What started as something to pass the time during breaks from class has led to them performing and recording tracks, which they then put out for the world on the music platform Soundcloud.
“We used to just freestyle at the lunch table for fun but it turned into something. We started recording as a joke and putting it out,” Negussie said. “But as the years went on, my friends and family pushed me to do it seriously.”
While Negussie wants to continue as a musician for the rest of his life, his pursuit of gold records will be paired with his pursuit of medical cures. He plans on pursuing a career in pediatrics and medical research, something he was inspired to do after a trip in seventh grade to Ethiopia, his home country where he immigrated from at the age of four.
“The main takeaway from that trip is to see how fortunate I was to come to the United States and learn here. There’s a huge lack of medical care, especially for the less affluent kids in Ethiopia who don’t live in the city,” Negussie said. “Just seeing how much they had to go through and how much medicine still has to go to make it accessible for all those other people that inspired me to become a doctor myself. That’s why I’m on the career path I’m on.”
The lack of medical access for children in Ethiopia is why he wants to pursue medical research and possibly work with groups like Doctors Without Borders or UNICEF once he’s finished with his higher education. And his time working at the Children’s Hospital Colorado made him want to focus his work on helping children in medial need.
“What I found at Children’s Hospital, a lot of the medical issues are congenital or genetic,” Negussie said. “Something those kids didn’t have a choice with and they fully trust their medical care providers because they’re so young and vulnerable. I find that so heartwarming.”