Image via W USA 9.

The seniors of Frank W. Ballou Senior High School in Southeast, DC had much to be proud of at this year’s graduation ceremony: In a first for the struggling school (where only three percent of students met city-wide reading standards in 2016), all 170 students of the 2017 graduating class has been accepted into college.


It was an uphill battle with Ballou High School losing a quarter of its teaching staff in the past academic year. Still, the class of 2017 made a pledge to all apply to college and, as of March, they achieved their goal. A couple months later and all of the students hold acceptance letters from schools ranging from Penn State and Virginia State to smaller, regional universities.

“Everybody just, they was betting on us failing, and we all came together and we graduated,” Senior Me’Ashja Hamilton, who will be attending Bethune Cookman University in Florida this Fall, told WUSA 9.


On the field, the graduating class sang Post Malone’s “Congratulations,” which includes the lyric, “They said I wouldn’t be nothing. Now they always say congratulations.”

Indeed: Congratulations to the inspiring, hardworking Ballou Senior High School class of 2017! They had more hurdles thrown in their way than any student should have to experience and they crushed it anyway.