Miss-Delectable
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http://www.beaufortgazette.com/local_news/story/5762431p-5153513c.html
Sitting calmly in Battery Creek High School's gymnasium, filled with teenagers ready to embrace their final hour as high school students, DeMario Taylor thought about how differently his high school journey played out.
As a deaf student, he arrived at Battery Creek in eighth grade from the S.C. School for the Deaf & the Blind in Spartanburg. He spent five years here with an interpreter.
But it's the little things that set him apart. He found it difficult to keep up with gossip in the classroom and cafeteria banter -- staples of a bubbly high school social life. He missed big things, too: He was the last student in school to find out about the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.
"All the other kids knew," he said through his interpreter, Julia Alvarez, teacher of the deaf at Battery Creek. "I had to ask, 'Why the confusion?'"
But sitting in the gymnasium, just before he walked across the graduation stage Tuesday night, DeMario said it was more than worth the wait. He's the third profoundly deaf student -- a severe degree of hearing loss -- to graduate from the school district, district officials said.
"I feel wonderful," he said. "I feel like I'm free, you know, like Martin Luther King's words, 'I'm free at last, free at last.'"
DeMario said he couldn't wait to finally grow up.
"Becoming a man has been important to me -- becoming an independent deaf person," he said. "That was a struggle."
Sitting calmly in Battery Creek High School's gymnasium, filled with teenagers ready to embrace their final hour as high school students, DeMario Taylor thought about how differently his high school journey played out.
As a deaf student, he arrived at Battery Creek in eighth grade from the S.C. School for the Deaf & the Blind in Spartanburg. He spent five years here with an interpreter.
But it's the little things that set him apart. He found it difficult to keep up with gossip in the classroom and cafeteria banter -- staples of a bubbly high school social life. He missed big things, too: He was the last student in school to find out about the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.
"All the other kids knew," he said through his interpreter, Julia Alvarez, teacher of the deaf at Battery Creek. "I had to ask, 'Why the confusion?'"
But sitting in the gymnasium, just before he walked across the graduation stage Tuesday night, DeMario said it was more than worth the wait. He's the third profoundly deaf student -- a severe degree of hearing loss -- to graduate from the school district, district officials said.
"I feel wonderful," he said. "I feel like I'm free, you know, like Martin Luther King's words, 'I'm free at last, free at last.'"
DeMario said he couldn't wait to finally grow up.
"Becoming a man has been important to me -- becoming an independent deaf person," he said. "That was a struggle."