DATA Awards Night 2013

Anthony's last awards ceremony for the year was last night, for his magnet school Design and Technology Academy (DATA). Patrick said he thought this night was even more important to these kids than the whole school graduation in two weeks. We've been to this ceremony before, because they also hand out awards for the other grades on this night, not just the seniors. This time was more special, of course. Anthony finally got one of those cool wooden statues that they hand out to every DATA senior!

Anthony received a DATA Award of Excellence, which means that at least one DATA teacher nominated him for his/her class. He has only one DATA teacher this year, Mrs. Vines, who already nominated him for the Core Value award for Perseverance (see last blog post) at the awards ceremony on Tuesday morning, so we figured that she had nominated him for this award as well. She was still out of town and couldn't be at this ceremony either. Apparently her daughter is competing at the NCAA Golf Tournament in Georgia this week and is up for the Woman Golfer of the Year.

Rackspace is one of the big companies in town and probably partly because of their proximity to Anthony's high school, they are big supporters. All the students at DATA have to give a Senior Design Project Presentation. This year, Rackspace asked the DATA faculty to choose ten student presentations to present at Rackspace with various employees from different levels of the company in attendance. The lady in this picture said that when the students were finished, she said they all looked each other and said, "Wow, these kids are all smarter than us." That was nice to hear since they chose Anthony as the first place winner! He received a $500 scholarship from Rackspace as his prize. Not to take anything away from Anthony, who did a lot of work and did a fabulous job on the presentation, but I told Patrick that prize partially belonged to him. Patrick guided Anthony through some of the technical aspects of building his model that I would never have thought of. Anthony's friend good friend Jake received third place. That was really awesome too!

Jake is the valedictorian of the class, and Anthony is the salutatorian. Amazingly, neither of them will be speaking at the whole school graduation. This concept seems so bizarre to Patrick and me, that #1 and #2 don't automatically get to speak at the graduation. At least Jake got to speak at the DATA graduation. He gave a very good speech that was a good mix of serious and fun.

Anthony also received a DATA Alliance scholarship for $1000. DATA Alliance is the PTA for DATA. They were able to raise enough money this year for eight such scholarships. Besides Anthony, four of his friends also received DATA Alliance scholarships, Maddy, Matt, Izzy, and Jake. They looked cool up there with their big checks.

The last award was for students that had received all four Core Value Awards. This was special because each student can only be nominated once per year. There were only sixteen seniors out of 88 that got all four Core Value Awards, and Anthony was one of them. We are SO proud of him!

This is a picture of the awards that he received all stacked up on the floor after the ceremony. He was socializing and didn't want to risk dropping any of them. I have to say that I got a kick out of seeing him and his friends carry around their big checks like the big lottery winners do. There were snacks afterwards as well, and Anthony typically wanted to have some treats, especially the traditional chocolate fountain. Anthony tweeted after the ceremony, "Plus that chocolate fountain. Highlight of my night. The awards were cool too. But they weren't smothered in chocolate." He totally puts things in perspective, and I love him for his humor. So proud of you, sweetie!