Twenty-five students in South Carolina graduate this week with twelve years of perfect attendance. Those students have attended 2,160 consecutive school days and have never been marked tardy in their entire school careers.
Several of those students are in the Upstate, including Boiling Springs High School Senior Mikell Adams and Chesnee High School Senior Justin Williams.
“We have days where snow would cancel school but I would be so nervous the whole school was pranking me, I would text my friends making sure school was canceled and I didn’t have to go to school. Its really stressful,” Adams explained.
Both credited their families for their support, and said achieving perfect attendance required a lot of dedication.
“It just took a lot of mental toughness. I had to realize every day I didn’t come to school would be a lesson I did not get to learn,” Williams said.
They say they were also lucky when it came to sickness. “It’s very odd,” Williams said. “I would get sick on a Friday after school if I was ever sick, and by the time Monday came around, it was all over.”
Their elementary school teachers aren’t surprised.
“He is a hard worker, even at such an early age I knew he was going to do big things,” Jamie Ryan said of Adams, who she taught as a first grader at Oakland Elementary School.
“He just lit up our classroom every day,” Amber Plumley said, after teaching Williams as a fifth grader at Cooley Springs-Fingerville Elementary.
Here are the other 25 students on the road to achieving perfect attendance at their high school graduation this year, along with Mike O’Shields, Rhea Wilson and Ashleigh Godfrey from Woodruff High School.