Preparing to move on: As seniors begin their final year in high school, they also look to the future

Some exciting and some stressful, the rites of passage from high school to adulthood are coming quickly, but mostly gradually, for many area students.

The pleasant rites include planning and attending the senior prom, taking senior photos, getting class rings and imagining an entirely new life, but on the more demanding side are getting accepted to college and keeping up grades for scholarship applications.

Cape Girardeau Central High School seniors Luke Kinder, Josh Morse, Anissa Wiant and Mackenzie Cannon are enjoying the status that seniors are traditionally accorded.

Like all graduates, they'll go their separate ways next year, but they expect to keep up their friendships during visits home and with those who attend the same colleges, which they say will be good not just for sentimental reasons but also as part of their support systems.

Kinder has been accepted by Baylor University in Waco, Texas, where he will study business; Morse hopes for a baseball scholarship as a catcher and plans to study physical therapy; and Wiant and Cannon are waiting to hear from the various colleges where they have applied to study music education and sociology, respectively.

Mackenzie Cannon and Luke Kinder talk with Cape Central principal Mike Cowan about their college plans Oct. 22 at Cape Girardeau Central High School. (Glenn Landberg)

"There is a fine balance between caring and moving on," Wiant said.

"We're more relaxed with the teachers," Cannon said. "There is, like, a trust."

"They don't treat you like you're 5 years old anymore," Wiant agreed.

"It's nice to do your own thing more of the time," Morse said. "You have a lot more freedom to choose how you want your year to go."

Having found himself in a leadership position as the sole senior on the soccer team, Kinder will keep working hard.

"You have to study," he said. "You can't let your grades slip."

Kinder said the girls generally find prom more exciting than the boys, but they all agreed that Central's policy of having the prom for seniors only makes it "more special."

Central principal Mike Cowan said the challenges confronting teachers, counselors, administrators and students have fostered a radically different scenario than the one from his high school days some 40 years ago.

"The expectations are much greater," Cowan said. "Because of the information explosion, the textbooks are thicker and there is much more information for the kids to master."

Cowan said the Internet exposes young people to adult material, and they can face bullying in social media.

"It's much more difficult to protect them from the ills of life than it once was," he said.

Schools work hard to prepare students to succeed in college, trade schools or the military and to compete in the global economy, and that job has been made bigger by the diminution of the traditional family unit and the need for educators to take on some parental roles.

"We're almost to the point where we have more divorces than marriages," Cowan said.

He said a small percentage of Central students lose contact with their parents and other relatives and end up living on their own, but that disturbing phenomenon is seen often enough not to be unusual.

"The teachers find out by surprise," Cowan said. "These discoveries happen regularly in our school."