As seniors get closer to graduation, the stress builds on, particularly to find a graduation speaker, to give the seniors one last chance to hear the advice they need to continue on a successful path. After multiple polls conducted by the Senior Class Committee, the graduation speaker they chose this year is ELA teacher Mr. Schaper. 

Mr Schaper has been teaching English here at Liberty for about eight years. 

“I was actually not expecting to be the graduation speaker,” Mr. Schaper said. “It was a total surprise.” 

This is Mr. Schaper’s first time speaking at a high school graduation ceremony and he is very excited to be the speaker. 

“Thankfully, nerves and excitement feel the same so I’m going to call it excitement,” Mr. Schaper said. 

Many of the seniors that chose him say that they chose him because he is well spoken and would probably write a good speech with little to no grammatical errors. 

“I thought it was a smart idea to have an English teacher as our speaker,” senior Francesca Aquino said, who had Mr. Schaper as her English teacher for two years. 

With graduation coming up in a few months, Schaper is already beginning to prepare to make his speech. He says he has told his students that his speech is too long, so he has to keep revising and annotating it. 

“To be honest, all I have done to prepare for graduation is mostly sweat and stare at a Google Doc,” states Mr. Schaper.