KHS to celebrate alumni feats in 15th year

A painting of a coconut crab, locally called the ayuyu, is a welcome sight for all students and visitors at Kagman High School. (Jon Perez)

Kagman High School will be celebrating its 15th birthday this year, with a plan to honor past graduates.

“It’s our 15th year and we want to celebrate the accomplishments of our alumni who have come through these doors, and turned into the leaders that we have in our community today,” said school principal Leila Staffler.

“We thank all of our alumni that have graduated and are contributing to our society. When we see you in the stores, or at seaports and airports wearing your uniforms or just doing your job, we’re very proud of you,” added Staffler.

There are no plans yet on how the celebration would go but, for now, they want to hand out specially printed shirts to some of their alumni.

“We actually plan to partner with some of our T-shirt vendors, so that we can do some T-shirts commemorating Ayuyu love out there—the Kagman family of graduates who have graduated and now are doing great things in our community.”

That’s why Staffler said they are challenging their students, specially the graduating class, to give their best this school year. “We encourage our kids to take chances and give their best effort to try something new. Who knows, it might be a career path that they never knew existed.”

“We want to encourage our kids to explore all the diffcareer opportunities that are out there so that they can come back to our community and become contributing partners,” she added.

KHS is currently trying to locate their alumni by using Google survey. Former KHS students can log on to http://goo.gl/6gTqaN, which is case sensitive, to encode basic information like what year they graduated.

So far, 30 KHS graduates have responded on their survey where some had attended Northern Marianas College, University of Guam, Willamette University in Oregon, Solano Community College and Grossmont College in California, Kapi’olani Community College in Hawaii, and Shoreline Community College in Washington State.

Some of their graduates who took the survey are also studying in the Philippines.

Staffler said there are more who have yet to answer the survey. “I know we have many students at the ports police and other airport jobs. Christian Pangelinan is one success story and he is a Customs officer now. There are several KHS [graduates who have become] customs officers.”

She added Kobe Tomokane and Catherine Dela Cruz are also two KHS alumni who are now police officers.

Some KHS teachers and staff are also giving back to the learning institution where they finished, like vice principals Nina Demapan and Ben Jones Jr., teachers Loremel Hocog and Ryan Camacho, and office staff Kimberly Camacho.