BY VINAYA SAKSENA

PAWTUCKET — At a time of year when high school graduations seem to be featured in the news on a daily basis, the Jacqueline M. Walsh School for the Performing and Visual Arts held a commencement ceremony that stood out from others for at least one reason: it was the school’s first ever.

On Wednesday night, school faculty and staff were joined by local and state-level officials in congratulating the school’s first ever graduating class in a commencement ceremony held in the Jenks Junior High School Auditorium. At that ceremony, it was clear that graduating students and adults who had supported the creation and operations of the school agreed: the last four years of hard work by both students and school staff had been worth it.
“Today, all our hard work has paid off,” said Class of 2009 Valedictorian Elyssa Cipriano. “We may have been criticized for going to an ‘arts school.’ But what do we care if we love what we do?”
“Our teachers have (worked) through terrible schedules and odd classroom settings,” Salutatorian Brittany Hennigan noted. “But they were still (happy) to teach here.”
This year’s graduating class, consisting of 22 students, was the first ever to graduate from the school, which is housed in the old Pawtucket Armory Building, where it shares space with the Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theater.
Named after a longtime Pawtucket teacher, arts advocate and former director of literacy programming in the Pawtucket School Department, the school was set up as a public school with a focus on arts education, accepting students from throughout the state but mainly from Pawtucket so far.
On hand for Wednesday’s ceremony were several state and local political figures with an interest in the school, including Pawtucket Mayor James Doyle and members of the Pawtucket School Committee. Several of the day’s speakers indicated having long been supporters of the arts school initiative, and noted that Walsh herself would have been proud to see what had come of it.
“This is a very historic event, for the City of Pawtucket and the State of Rhode Island,” Doyle said. “Adding to the historic component of today’s event is that this is the first ever graduating class from our only public arts high school.”
Tony Estrella, Artistic Director of the Feinstein-Gamm Theater, encouraged the graduating students to continue utilizing the creativity they had nurtured at the school, and to think of “success” in life as more than attaining fame and fortune. He criticized what he said were manufactured and mediocre manifestations of the arts in the form of American Idol and other popular music and performing outlets utilizing a high levels of career management skill and low levels of creativity. Rhode Island Symphony Orchestra Conductor Francisco Noya noted that creativity was a skill that required discipline and practice to maintain, much like the physical skills required of athletes.
“You have to practice your imagination,” Noya told the graduates. “You have to exercise it every single day.”
The departing seniors who spoke that day said they were ready to do so, while also calling upon future graduates to maintain and build upon the standards they had set. After receiving their diplomas, officers of the graduating class called their counterparts in the junior class to the stage to accept with four items symbolizing their devotion to this pursuit: An artist’s paintbrush, a conductor’s baton, an actor’s book of plays and a dancer’s ballet shoes- representing the four creative disciplines taught at the school.
The officers of the Class of 2010 indicated that they would accept the challenge laid before them. Cipriano, meanwhile, said that she and her fellow graduates were ready to take on the challenges offered by life after high school.
“We started at the Pawtucket Armory with little more than talent, hope and an expensive lease,” she said. “Our work has proven that the school has been a success. Now, let’s prove that we graduates can be a success as well. I know we can.”