Beginning last Saturday, with the 2019 graduates from Porters Chapel Academy receiving their diplomas, through this week with Warren Central, Vicksburg and St. Aloysius graduates receiving their diplomas, we are again congratulating, offering well wishes and words of encouragements to another batch of our community’s best.

Each year, we mark this milestone in the lives of these students with a ceremony, a dinner or celebration and a final word before we send them off to either college or a career.

More than ever, we have set tremendously high expectations for graduates, challenging them to take hold of a world we, as adults, barely have a grip on.

Today, as a society, we as adults ask of them to do more than we did, faster than we did and better than we did.

But in some cases, we fail to give them the tools and support needed to back up those expectations.

Today it seems that results of standardized testing have replaced the criteria of making someone ready for life.

Thankfully, the Vicksburg-Warren School District is changing that mindset.

While standardized tests are still required and begrudgingly given, the threshold for a student’s success now stands are they prepared for college, career and life.

The success of an education cannot be firmly placed on the student’s ability on a test. But rather a student’s ability to learn, grow and provide for a life for themselves and one day their family, while at the same time making the community and society they live better.

That is a far loftier goal than simply the results of a test.

Our society depends on this generation, and the next, and the next, to be better than the one before it. If not, we as a society will slide. We have seen some of that decline in some areas of our society already.

While this time of year is a celebration for work already accomplished and goals already met, it is also the start of something far bigger and far more important than a diploma.

This time of year marks the starting point for the next class’ opportunity to change the world and that is something we can all get excited about regardless if we have someone in our family graduating.