See this year&#39;s valedictorians, salutatorians, Extraordinary Seniors&nbsp;and more.

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Meet 9 extraordinary Long Island high school seniors

He was a starting QB while undergoing chemotherapy; she recycles 10K bottles a month: Meet LI's Extraordinary Seniors

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We asked Newsday&#39;s 2023 Extraordinary Seniors what the past four&nbsp;years have taught them.

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Newsday's 2023 Extraordinary Seniors reflect on their high school years

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Meet Newsday's 2023 Extraordinary Seniors

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Long Island's 2013 high school valedictorians: 10 years later

10 years ago, they were valedictorians. Where are they now?

Meet LI's Class of 2023 valedictorians

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Meet LI's Class of 2023 salutatorians

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Dandan Zou

When Jericho High School senior Danush Sinnan was called to the co-principal's office a few months ago,&nbsp;he wasn't sure why. 
 But he saw he had company&nbsp;and quickly found out&nbsp;the news was good: He and the others had been&nbsp;named valedictorians of their senior class.&nbsp; 
 There were 15 of them in all. 
 “I knew there would be multiple,” said Sinnan, 18. “I didn’t expect to see it&nbsp;as big as it was.” 
 While no one in Jericho was surprised that the high school has multiple valedictorians —&nbsp;there were eight last year —&nbsp;some were surprised to learn how many. It's&nbsp;a record, as far as anyone can remember. The number represents 5% of the graduating class of about 315.&nbsp;The valedictorians, who are all going to college, share the same unweighted GPA of 4.0. &nbsp;Jericho has no&nbsp;salutatorian. 
 Students and educators say the number&nbsp;reflects the excellence of its graduating class, but they&nbsp;acknowledged the question it raises: Does the growing number render&nbsp;the&nbsp;distinction, well, less distinctive? 
 It sparks another question: Who's going to speak at the commencement ceremony, set for Sunday morning?&nbsp;Answer: They all are. For 90 seconds each. 
 Overall, to have multiple valedictorians is&nbsp;highly unusual. In&nbsp;Long&nbsp;Island’s 124 school districts, <a href="https://projects.newsday.com/feature-grid/education/long-island-valedictorians-2023/#/!">only a few other schools</a> have more than one&nbsp;this graduation&nbsp;season, including Paul D. Schreiber High School in Port Washington (3);&nbsp;West Islip High School (3);&nbsp;Great Neck North High School (2);&nbsp;Commack High School (2) and South Side High School in Rockville Centre (2). 
 Last year's eight&nbsp;was a record-setting number for Jericho, at least since 1998, when&nbsp;there was only one valedictorian, according to Newsday archives. 
<h2> The 'A-plus method' </h2> 
 One reason Jericho routinely produces multiple&nbsp;valedictorians&nbsp;is that the school uses an unweighted formula under which any student who receives a top score in all their high school classes receives that honor. Some call it the &quot;A-plus method.&quot; Most other schools use weighted systems. 
 Hank Grishman, the school district's superintendent of 28 years, said&nbsp;Jericho has been using the same unweighted formula to select the valedictorians for as long as he’s been at the district. 
 &quot;It's wonderful to recognize so many kids for their academic success over four years of their high school experience,&quot; Grishman said. 
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 Students and educators said they were glad to celebrate the&nbsp;group of high achievers&nbsp;but agreed&nbsp;that the&nbsp;system does not&nbsp;distinguish between the rigor&nbsp;of the courses students take — for example,&nbsp;between an Advanced Placement course and a regular class. Some of the toughest courses a few valedictorians&nbsp;said they&nbsp;took were AP courses in chemistry, physics and calculus. 
 “When you have situations like what we're experiencing in Jericho, where we have such a vast number of students that are achieving at the highest levels, obviously the system is not making distinctions between their coursework,” co-Principal David Cohen said. 
 Four of the valedictorians Newsday spoke to&nbsp;said they were happy to share&nbsp;the top academic honor, as it acknowledged their years of hard work. But some concurred that the upward trend warrants another look at the selection process. 
 “I do think we need an updated system that takes into account of people who take more&nbsp;rigorous classes,”&nbsp;said Katie Tian, 17.&nbsp; 
 Joshua Ochalek, 18, agreed. 
 “Obviously, it's still an amazing honor to have,” he&nbsp;said. “It brings up a big debate about should it change, or does it work properly?” 
<h2> Revised grade-weighting system in the works </h2> 
 The Jericho school board in January <a href="https://jerichoschoolny.iqm2.com/Citizens/FileOpen.aspx?Type=12&amp;ID=1328&amp;Inline=True">adopted</a> a revised weighting system for its high school courses, to take effect in July, though the board has yet to decide whether to tie it, or something&nbsp;different,&nbsp;to its valedictorian selection. 
 School board president Jill Citron&nbsp;said the board will get input from students, teachers and parents in the coming year. 
 “We're going to look into whether we should continue to do it unweighted,” she said. “We will take opinions from all the different stakeholders, primarily the students.” 
 Should the process change, Citron said, it wouldn’t affect the 2024 graduating class and may take years to implement. 
 “It could possibly take four years to change it because all the current high school students have come in with a certain mindset —&nbsp;the ones who are trying to become valedictorians,” she said. 
 Students&nbsp;noted the competitive culture at Jericho High School, one of the best-ranked schools in the region as well as the state, and how that should play a role in considering&nbsp;a new system. 
 “There’s a lot of comparing and competing in Jericho, not just grades, but extracurricular activities,” said Tian, who has a younger sister in middle school. “I wouldn’t want to put more pressure on my sister’s grade.” 
 A few students said they are not sure whether&nbsp;it would be fair to differentiate one student from another by a small&nbsp;variation in grade from one class in high school, but they wondered whether having one valedictorian would lessen some of the pressure. 
 “Right now, every kid is focused on their grades,” Ochalek said. But school “is not just about the grades. It's about doing other things. It's about having fun as a child and all these different things.” 
 However, Samuel Kane, 18,&nbsp;said the current system helps foster collaborations. 
 “If you have one spot available and 15 or 20 kids are gunning for it, it creates competition,” he said. Under the current system,&nbsp;it’s “you versus yourself.”&nbsp; 
 With Dorothy Levin and Kimberly Yuen

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Jericho High School's Class of 2023 has 15 valedictorians. How did that happen?

15 valedictorians at Jericho? It's a record.

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While Jericho High School routinely produces multiple valedicatorians, this year that number has&nbsp;almost doubled, to 15. NewsdayTV&#39;s Macy Egeland and Newsday Education Reporter Dandan Zou look into how this happened and what to expect at graduation.

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A record-breaking 15 valedicatorians this year at Jericho High School

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Beth Whitehouse

Zachary Zutler is a member of the Class of 2023. But you might also say he and his fellow high school graduates across Long Island are also the Class of COVID-19. 
 Their four years of high school were bookended by the beginning and the end of the pandemic. Zutler, 18, a senior at Plainview-Old Bethpage John F. Kennedy High School, remembers learning of the quarantine’s start when he was a freshman at an after-school lacrosse practice, and last month the World Health Organization declared the pandemic over as Zutler and his classmates anticipated their march to “Pomp and Circumstance.” 
 “This year was probably the first completely normal year,” Zutler says of his high school experience. “It felt like everything was like it was supposed to be.” That wasn’t the case for his first three years. Seniors across Long Island&nbsp;share what it was like to live through history while also coming of age. 
<h2> Freshman year, 2019 to 2020 </h2> 
 “Being able to start high school with a normal world, I had a great time,” says Jae Kim, 17, senior class council president at William Floyd High School in Mastic Beach. “Up until the pandemic, I met so many new people.” 
 But when quarantine hit in March of 2020, “it was such a shock to everyone,” says Corey Wong, 17, valedictorian of Mount Sinai High School. 
 At first, students were excited — two weeks off! “We can go home and do whatever we want.&nbsp;Teachers weren’t prepared, so they didn’t send us home with much work,” says Minnahil Tariq, 17, a senior at Brentwood High School. “The news of COVID and its effect weren’t bad, fear of the virus didn’t really set in yet. Especially as kids — we were only 13, 14 back then.”&nbsp; 
 But as the pandemic surged on, “it was really hard to be pulled away from our friends and our teachers,” Zutler says. “It was very surreal and confusing at the time.” Cellphones became students’ main lifelines, students say. 
 “I lost a lot of interest in the school clubs and activities I was in,” says Alyssa Williams, 17, co-student senate president at West Islip High. “I kind of just gave up on high school. I went through a period where I didn’t do any homework. My grades got pretty bad at the end of freshman year.” 
 That summer after freshman year was also a dud, they say. Zutler says he missed his last summer at sleepaway camp before he aged out of the program there. 
<h2> Sophomore year, 2020 to 2021 </h2> 
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 Sophomore year was the toughest, students say, both academically and socially. 
 Many schools employed a hybrid schedule. For instance, sophomores whose last names started with A through K went to school on Mondays and Wednesdays, and sophomores whose last names started with L through Z went to school Tuesdays and Thursdays. When they weren’t physically in school students attended the class virtually. 
 “That was probably just as hard as being online,” Zutler says. “Me being a Z, I was away from all my friends with names higher in the alphabet.” 
 Says Wong: “You had to wake up and remember if you were even going to school that day.” 
 If you played a sport, and there was after-school practice, you had to figure out how to get to school in the afternoon, says David Ramirez, 17, a senior at Brentwood High School who played on the tennis team. 
 The alternate days spent at home had too many distractions to allow for academic focus, Ramirez says. “From cellphones to siblings,” Ramirez says. “There was no teacher watching over you specifically, since we didn’t have our cameras on in some classes.” 
 Williams says her grades continued to suffer because she had fallen into bad academic habits. “I definitely had no drive,” she says. 
 Ailyn Vasquez, 18, a senior at Brentwood High School, echoes Williams. “Just kind of sleeping a lot, sleeping in a lot … being kind of bored,” she says. Other students say they remember just lying in their beds listening to class. 
 “That definitely affected us, our brain chemistry,” Kim says of going to school online. For him, though, the change was a positive. “Having everything online in a digital age made me more organized and allowed me to get my work done much faster,” Kim says. 
 Readjustment socially wasn’t easy after being home for so long, some students say. “I was already socially anxious. Once I came back to school sophomore year, it was really hard to reconnect,” Vasquez says. “Especially because people had masks on, you couldn’t see people.” 
 Many social and club activities were on screens or canceled altogether. “We got one pep rally our entire years of high school,” says Rose Fernandez, 18, president of the senior class at Newfield High School in Selden.&nbsp; 
 It was sad to have big events canceled, Williams says. For instance, during freshman year spirit week at West Islip High School, each class decorated a hallway. &quot;It was so much fun, the hallways were beautiful. We didn't do it in 10th grade,&quot; she says.&nbsp; 
<h2> Junior year, 2021 to 2022 </h2> 
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 Many schools had the entire student body back full time in person. Getting back into the groove of a physical and mental routine was tough, Fernandez says. So was continuing to wear masks, which were required all day for the majority of the academic year. “Our mouths were literally covered up,” she says. 
 “Junior year was still a little — how do I put this? It was still weird going back after two years that just weren’t normal years,” Ramirez agrees. 
 COVID-19 still hovered over everything early in the school year. It affected, for instance, attendance at school and events when people tested positive. LaDuke Harris Jr., 17, then the quarterback of the&nbsp;William Floyd High School football team, says he got the virus in the days&nbsp;leading up to&nbsp;the&nbsp;&quot;Battle of the Parkway&quot;&nbsp;annual rivalry game against Longwood High School in Middle Island and had to miss it due to the need to quarantine for 10 days. &quot;I was really excited about that game,&quot; he says.&nbsp; 
 Eventually, the virus seemed to recede and masks were no longer needed. “It was nice to see everybody’s faces again,” Zutler says. 
 Williams says she started to pull her grades up when “going back to a regular schedule where I was held a little bit more accountable. Junior year gave me a boost for college.” She got involved in the student senate. 
 By the end of the year, events came back in full, and some were even better than they'd been in the past, Fernandez says. For instance, Newfield High School's junior prom had always been held in the school gym, but their class was able to have the event at a venue instead. Now future classes will also have that option, she says. 
 One positive outcome of the pandemic, Vasquez says, is that people now prioritize mental health more after being isolated and seeing people experience depression and anxiety. “We came out of this being more open minded … about mental illness and its effects. I think it makes us a better society,” she says.&nbsp; 
<h2> Senior year, 2022 to 2023 </h2> 
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 “For our senior year, we were able to come back together and have a normal senior high school experience, which was very rewarding after the past three years we’d gone through.&nbsp;We were able to have the same trips we were supposed to, different competitions. We had our Senior Week where we went to our elementary and middle shcools to wear our cap and gowns and see our teachers. 
 &quot;Being able to spend our final day in high school together, we got together for the final bell. This coming week we're looking forward to being about to have graduation back in its normal place,” says Zutler, who will attend the University of Georgia.&nbsp;Students are happy and grateful for the chance at least to experience their final milestones together without limitations, he says. 
 As for the other years of the pandemic:&nbsp;“It definitely had a huge impact on how my high school career played out. I wouldn’t say that it ruined it, but I definitely wish things went differently,” Williams says. Her emotions during the pandemic contributed to her decision to study psychological sciences at the University of Connecticut, she says.&nbsp; 
 “It taught us to overcome any adversities that we face and taught us to adapt, and showed us how powerful we really are,” points out Kim, who plans to study political science at Binghamton University before moving to a program at Boston University. 
 “I think that most of the students I went to high school with the past four years can all agree with what I’m about to say: It was very difficult,” says Fernandez, who will attend SUNY Albany and study childhood education. “We should really give ourselves a pat on the back.”

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The pandemic class: Long Island's 2023 graduating seniors on how COVID-19 bookended their high school experience 

The pandemic class: Graduating seniors on how COVID bookended their HS experience 

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LI Class of 2023 college commitments

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Joie Tyrrell

Twin sisters Gloria Guerrier and Victoria Guerrier, both seniors at West Hempstead Secondary School, share a talent for&nbsp;music, science and track and field. 
 The 17-year-old sisters learned Wednesday that they now share another designation — both have graduated at the top of their class.&nbsp;Gloria Guerrier was just named the valedictorian and Victoria the salutatorian for West Hempstead's&nbsp;Class of 2023.&nbsp; 
 &quot;Their character is really what makes them stand apart,&quot; said guidance counselor Jackie Zorskas, who is also their track coach. &quot;They are the most hardworking, dedicated, independent&nbsp;and kind students that we have.&quot; 
 Year after year they have chosen and enrolled in the most rigorous advanced courses and never earned lower than a 100 on their transcript. They are three-sport varsity athletes and members of various clubs at school. Gloria graduated with a grade-point average of 105.3 and Victoria earned a 104.9. 
 Both are going to Yale University where they will be on the school's track team. They both want to study artificial intelligence.&nbsp;But they may not be roommates. The sisters are two of five children. 
 &quot;We have been roommates forever,&quot; said Gloria. &quot;It's best to venture out and meet new people and create our own circle of friends.&quot; 
 The twins have both earned All-County and All-State honors in both the winter and spring track seasons. They both have also qualified and competed at the New Balance National Championships during their junior year and were selected by coaches across Nassau County to receive the Section 8 Athlete of the Year award. 
 They are also involved with community activities as member of the Teen Council of the community library, a peer support program called Sources of Strength, Athletes Helping Athletes, New York State Music Association, and the New York University Step Up program. 
 They play in the school's orchestra and other musical ensembles. Victoria plays the cello and Gloria the viola. They are both in music honor societies. 
 And they both work in a local boutique. They had worked through much of their high school career at McDonald's. 
 &quot;We&nbsp;are doing a lot. We love to multitask — it’s a talent we have,&quot; Victoria said. &quot;In our spare time between practices we love to fill in with homework.&quot; 
 The sisters credit their parents who are both immigrants from Haiti for their inspiration. Their father, Jonas, earned a&nbsp;scholarship to Clemson University and became a science teacher until an illness sidetracked him from his career. He is now a nursing home resident, Gloria said.&nbsp; 
 &quot;He demonstrated the value of&nbsp;hard work and education and he came from a very poor family in Haiti,&quot; Gloria said. 
 Their mother,&nbsp;Marie Josee Noel, took on two additional jobs while working as a respiratory therapist when their father became sick in 2016, and she still managed to care for the twins and their siblings. Victoria said her mother worked very hard to give them opportunities. 
 They don't consider themselves in competition with one another. Rather, Gloria said it is like when &quot;iron strengthens iron.&quot; 
 &quot;We try to improve each other — not break us down,&quot; she said. 
 Zorskas said for all of their achievements, the sisters are very humble.&nbsp; 
 &quot;They are always surprised at how well they do,&quot; she said.

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Twins are valedictorian and salutatorian at West Hempstead school

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Twin sisters Gloria Guerrier and Victoria Guerrier ranked the top two in their class at West Hempstead Secondary School. Gloria Guerrier was named the valedictorian and Victoria the salutatorian for West Hempstead&#39;s&nbsp;Class of 2023.

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West Hempstead twins named valedictorian and salutatorian

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Twin sisters take top two spots in West Hempstead's Class of 2023

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Long Island 2023 high school graduations

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