“I think that I am the type of person that likes to see everything out there. This is the perfect place for me to grow up and I will never forget it.” – Suzanne
2001 – The front entrance to the current high school building
Suzanne, a senior at Steelton-Highspire High School, has grown up in Steelton all of her life. She has great pride in the town and in the school, but as she looks towards the future and the world after she graduates in June, 2001, she will follow her dreams wherever they end up taking her. “I think that I am the type of person that likes to see everything out there. This is the perfect place for me to grow up and I will never forget it. I will bring people back and show them, but I think that there is just so much more out there that I have to see that I probably wouldn’t want to live here my whole life.”
Suzanne grew up in a small neighborhood just blocks away from the high school. With the athletic facilities so close by, she was always going to the games and seeing the other residences come out to support their home team. When thinking of a word that, to her, best describes Steelton, pride was the first thing to come to mind.
Suzanne’s neighborhood on Roller Drive is considered the best place to grow up in her eyes. “I lived in a neighborhood. I think that it is one of the best neighborhoods in this town and there were so many kids on the street. We could play, I mean we would be outside for a whole day just playing. And, I don’t know if I went anywhere else I would have had that type of experience.” Generations after generations have remained in her neighborhood, with families watching after one another while the kids play in the street.
Suzanne is in the Honors Program in her high school, and belongs to the National Honors Society, Foreign Language Club, as well as other organizations. The Honors Program is made up of approximately sixteen other students who are separated from the student body and, as a group, take more challenging courses. Students not in the program often treat them differently, claiming that they receive special treatment. However, Suzanne and her friends greatly disagree. This segregation between her peers, however, is something that she has mildly regretted through the years. “That’s one of the things that I kind of didn’t like about the program at first. I love being with this group but in the real world, you are with different people in different classes in college and I don’t think that they set it up like.”
She regrets the fact that Steelton-Highspire High School often receives a bad reputation, and she articulates this feeling by saying, “Anywhere you go, you are going to get something bad, you know, but nobody seems to look at the good things here.” Suzanne, however, stands out as being a very enlightened young woman with an open heart. When discussing what impact attending a diverse school has played in her life she stated, “I accept people more and I tend not to judge people on just how they look. I am just not that type of person, I get to know people first.”
Now that it is her turn to go off to college, she reflects on the experience her mom went through after graduating from Steelton High. “My mom, when she was younger, she really didn’t think about going off to college when she was done. She was ready to settle down and stuff and now she is pushing me to go off to college and stuff because she knows how hard it is out in the real world to get a job.”
When asked if there was one piece of advice that she could pass on to her children, she naturally said, “Probably to accept people for who they are and to never hold grudges.”
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