Hamm Graduation-Somewhere over the Rainbow

We attended graduation for the Hamm Center at the Atlanta Speech School today. Graduation day is a proud day for all parents. It represents accomplishments like getting straight A's. It represents life stages, Kindergarten, High School, College. Today's graduation was different from any other graduation I had attended. Today's graduation represented sacrifice and overcoming struggles. The traditional graduation is a student walking across the stage to get a diploma and one commencement speaker. Today these kids needed no one to stand in front of them and tell them that life is not always fair, or that challenges will face them, or that they need to find motivation for the future. Today each kid graduating(ages 2-7) stopped at that podium and gave a personal graduation speech. Yes, each child up there today was deaf or hard of hearing but they spoke and we listened. They talked about how long they had been at speech school, what they will miss, and which school they would mainstream to next. It's powerful to see a young child thank their teachers who taught them how to talk ,and their parents for driving them to school everyday from all around the city. We heard about dreams..one cute, little boy in a bowtie said he wanted to be a lawyer and a girl said she wanted to be a fashion designer. One boy said he would be the only kid in his new school with cochlear implants, but that he would teach everyone about them:). Amelia's class sang "wheels on the bus." At the beginning of the year most of the kids only said a few words and now they are singing sentences. Three of Amelia's classmates were ready to graduate out of the program (max, ella, sloane.) Amelia will need to return next year for more speech. At the end they did a slideshow and one of the songs was "somewhere over the rainbow" by Iz. It's a great song and it could not have been more appropriate for the families sitting in that room. We all are on a journey, a road, walking across a rainbow. Some days are good, some days are blue. You have to walk uphill to get to the other side of the rainbow. Families in that graduation room today know this. They have sacrificed so much for their kids to be at speech school. Some had to give up their jobs, some had to work extra hours to pay, some had to move closer, and siblings had to tag along to therapy sessions. I think that "over the rainbow" is where peace lives, where dreams come true, and where struggles are behind you. In those speeches today, we got a glimpse of...somewhere over the rainbow:) Peace, Love, Rainbow-Scarlett