Hannah Sparling

The Cincinnati Enquirer

CINCINNATI — In case you forget: You matter — a lot.

And you’re annoying, sometimes, but for the most part, you’re amazing.

“So go be great,” teacher Sinita Scott tells her seniors, who are crowded in the cafetorium on their last day of school.

Scott teaches English at Robert A. Taft Information Technology High School in Cincinnati, and this year, she’s giving her seniors an unusual sendoff: a personal gift and letter for each.

Eighty-seven students. Eighty-seven letters. Eighty-seven gifts.

One girl is known for lugging around huge, encyclopedia-size books. Sometimes, she lugs an actual encyclopedia. Scott got her a T-shirt that says, “I like big books and I cannot lie.”

An aspiring hairdresser got a smock: “Don’t make me cut you.”

A student known for getting worked up got a collection of stress balls to take to college. A quiet boy got a journal.

“You have a whole lot to say,” Scott said, “You just don’t say it.”

This is Scott’s fourth year at Taft, and she taught most of these seniors twice and some of them three times. The 31-year-old from Evanston knew she wanted to do something for their graduation, and the more she thought about it, the bigger the idea grew.

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She started an online fundraiser, and she started writing and shopping. The gifts are small, about $10 each, give or take, but the message is big. Scott wants her students to remember her class, how they started as sophomores and how different they were by graduation.

They were afraid to fail, but they tried anyway. And they made it. Each has a plan for after graduation, Scott said — either college or trade school or military service.

“The whole, ‘I’m going out into the world’ thing is hitting them really hard,” she said. But she reminds them, “You’re doing it right now, and you’re OK.”

The students graduate on Wednesday, and they opened their gifts this past week. One, University of Cincinnati-bound, pumped his fist in excitement after opening his gift: UC gear.

Another was surprised when he got an NBA Clippers lanyard; he didn’t realize Scott knew that was his team.

Scott loves teaching English. But more than that, she longs to teach life. She thinks one of the main stumbling blocks for students is they don’t have the words to effectively express what's bothering them. So when something goes wrong, they use the words they do know, and they get in trouble.

“Every time you get mad at a teacher, you can’t say, ‘F you, b----,” and here, always in teacher mode, Scott spells outs the profanity.

In the cafetorium, seniors "ooh" and "aww" and cheer as Scott gives her speech. She tells them they are her favorite class ever, and she admits, finally, that she gave them more work than normal.

She sees a monumental difference in them now versus four years ago. And she tells them that in her letters. She still calls them her kids, but she knows they are grown men and women, ready to take on the world.

“Please don’t sell yourself short,” she wrote to one student, “because there is greatness within you that goes far beyond your sports ability.”

To another: “I expect great things from you, and I know that you won’t disappoint!”

Scott loves these students. But they are, after all, teenagers, and they had their moments. Right before prom was particularly rough this year, Scott said: “They were not nice people.” And through the years, Scott has been yelled at and cussed out. Sometimes, students lie. Sometimes, they don’t do homework. Sometimes, they refuse to study for a test, and so, they fail.

“Sometimes, students want to go toe-to-toe and argue,” Scott said. “But they’re kids. And I always have to remember that their brains aren’t fully developed.”

Sitting in her empty classroom one day after school, Scott ran through story after story of how great this class is and how much she’ll miss them. There was the time she found out a bunch of them were using lighters in the school bathroom for a Fahrenheit 451 project. She was amazed by their creativity and appalled by their disregard for safety and smoke detectors.

There was the time one girl staged a boycott for a test, and she persuaded all but two students to skip. Scott was livid, but she gave them all zeros, and it never happened again. (That girl, whose mantra at the time was that she didn’t care because she wasn’t going to college, is now planning to study pediatrics.)

The class talked about morals this year. Is it always cut and dry? Or is there a lot of uncomfortable gray we don’t like to acknowledge?

They read A Lesson Before Dying, and even though death is in the title, the students got so caught up in the book they thought the main character was somehow going to escape.

“So at the end, when he gets the electric chair, they cry,” Scott said. “To me, it’s important that literature can have that type of effect.”

They call themselves Cincinnati's version of the “Freedom Writers," and Scott doesn't know if she'll ever be able to recreate this bond with another class. She's going to miss it all, she said — the great, the terrible and the ho-hum.

There’s a kid named Nijha’i, for example, and he was always loitering in the hallway outside Scott’s room.

“Go to class, go to class, go to class,” Scott would say — bell after bell, day after day, week after month after year.

But now, that’s over.

They’re leaving.

“Just thinking about the fact that I’m not going to say, ‘Nijha’i, go to class,’” Scott said. “I’m not going to ever say that again. That’s bittersweet.”