Good evening and uh welcome to the uh evening ceremonial session, the spotlight session of Hampton City Council.

Want to welcome all of you this evening as we uh celebrate uh valedictorians and salutatorians from four high schools here in Hampton.

And uh with that, I want to ask the uh clerk to call the role.

Councilman Bowman.

Present.

Councilman Brown here, Vice Mayor Gray, present.

Councilwoman Harper, present, councilman Hobbs, present.

Councilwoman Muggler, present.

Mayor Tubbs.

Good, thank you.

And before I turn it over to um uh EMC uh marketing strategist, Miss McCormick, I want to acknowledge uh members of the school board here.

We have uh our chair of the school board, Dr.

Richard Mason, and also uh Dr.

Reginald Woodhouse and Mr.

Joe Kilgore and have our superintendent Dr.

Raymond Haynes.

Uh, thank you for being with us this evening.

I would try to go through all the staff members that are sitting out there, but I may miss somebody, but uh thank you all for be here for being here to uh support your students.

And with that, I would like to turn it over to uh Miss Robin McCormick, uh communication strategist to uh introduce the program this evening.

Thank you.

Uh thank you, Vice Mayor Gray, members of City Council, Manager Bunning, Attorney Bond, and the honorees and guests who are here this evening.

Good evening, everyone.

Tonight marks a special edition of our spotlight series.

We're here to celebrate the incredible achievements of Hampton City School's most outstanding scholars, our 2024 valedictorians and salutatorians.

We also extend thanks to the dedicated staff members who have served these students talents.

Now I was going to introduce the school board, but I think that's been done.

I do believe um I did to introduce uh deputy superintendent Dr.

John Caggiano, Chief of Secondary School Leadership, Shamika Pollard, and Dr.

Stacia Barrault, Chief of Elementary School Leadership.

Thank you all for coming.

I will get to the principals later.

But before we honor these amazing young people, I want to take a moment to acknowledge the village that raised them.

Welcome and congratulations to the proud families of our graduates and any others who helped nurture them and prod them along the way.

So to kick off this evening and to truly understand the journey that led these students to this night, we will be treated to a special video produced by Wibekabray of Hampton's Channel 27 that dives deeper into each student's achievement.

Then we will honor the students as we go.

We're gonna start with Kick Atan, and I would like to explain.

I was also admitted to UVA as an echo scholar as well as Virginia Tech and BCU along with the Georgia Institute of Technology.

I chose Washington University in St.

Louis because it ranked very highly among uh students that were interested in pre-medicine and they have a huge network of support and excellent pre-medical advising, so they could prepare me and it was a really good gateway for me to go into medical school.

I'm thinking of majoring in computational biology, and I'm really interested in biology, and I'm really interested in computers, so I decided to merge into computers.

Ever since I was young, I was always fond of computers.

I would always take my dad's laptop when he wasn't looking, and I would like just try to open stuff up, look at all the files in there, trying to figure out what was really going on in that computer.

And as I went through high school, I started to uh learn how to code, and I developed a few things that are from the app store, and it's just been really fun getting to learn all sorts of different fields, you know.

Data science, I've tried to learn about data science and how machine learning really works, and I've you know created created a few apps that were based on that.

Uh machine learning code and games and websites.

I just delved into all the different sorts of computer uh systems and interest spots, and I and I wanted to combine that with what I wanted to do, which was going to medicine and become a doctor.

So biology was also very interesting.

I remember taking my first biology class in my freshman year with Miss Chang, and it was just super interesting to kind of see how all these little things that are in our bodies that they have their own systems, they're all they're almost like computers themselves.

I first would want to thank my dad.

He was never up to an emotional support, but he was always a work this work hard.

He always pushed me to my limits.

He kind of taught me to sometimes ignore my emotions and work towards this one goal.

He's a very um he's a very goal-based guy, and this inspired me.

And on the other side, my mom kind of catered to my emotional needs.

She was always there when I was having a rough day, or I got a bath test from a grade, or I had several video exams that were coming up that I had to study for.

So I kind of got both sides uh of a human from my parents.

And I also want to take thank my teacher, uh, Mr.

Bain.

He's been there since my sophomore year, and I've had him in two different classes, and he's always been there, and he's always helped me with whatever tasks I was working on, and he motivated also motivated me to move forward.

I'm Anna Brady, and it's living right in the cookery in high school for the class of 2024.