PHOTOS: RISE Academy sees off 78 graduates Thursday night

Published 5:40 am Friday, May 17, 2024

Thursday’s heavy rain and thunderstorms didn’t stop 78 RISE Academy graduates from graduating at Tyler High School’s gymnasium.

The students and their supporters were greeted by DeMario Miller, RISE Academy’s Teacher of the Year and then an invocation by Dr. Eric Johnson.

Board President Wade Washmon commended the students on their success and announced to the crowd that the graduates were eligible to receive their diplomas.

“It was a phenomenal night,” said principal Dr. Dexter Floyd. “I’m really excited about our kids.”

On top of the 78 who graduated, there are an additional 10 slated to graduate this summer, bringing the total number of 88 Early College 2024 graduates.

The class also included 23 early graduates who were supposed to graduate in 2025.

“But for that tenacity, hard work … they ended up graduating a year early,” Floyd said. “So I’m really excited about that as well.”

RISE Academy is an acronym for Reaching for Inspiration with Speed and Excellence. It started out as a program but has grown into a school. But at the beginning, by TEA standards, RISE Academy had an ‘F’ rating.

“But just in the last two years, we’ve been in an A-rated campus,” Floyd said. “It’s not anything that I’ve done. It’s not anything that the teachers have done … it’s what our kids brought into. We wanted to do this vision of them having another opportunity to be successful in what they were doing.”

The focus of RISE Academy is to provide dropout prevention, credit recovery, and self-paced learning opportunities for at-risk students.

“Tonight has been a blast,” Floyd said. “My kids deserved it and I’m excited for them.”