Graduating seniors gathered in late May for the annual Senior Brick Ceremony, where several seniors and their parents gathered to place bricks bearing their names and graduation years into the sidewalk leading into Graduates’ Grove. Seniors Alyssa Donovan, Ananya Anand, Christine Emery, Nirupama Gadagottu, Chetan Vakkalagadda, Kartik Venkatraman, Amanda Wong and Hanh Dang were present at the ceremony to place their bricks in the grove.

Following the ceremony, the students, parents and teachers present turned their attention to the future site of the new US library, where library director Enid Davis said a few words about the bumpy road that led to this momentous occasion. “When the seniors here today were only two years old,” she said, “Mr. (Howard) Nichols asked me on my first day of work to design a new library on this very site.” Factors such as the opening of a high school, the dot-com bubble and the recent economic hardship delayed the building of the new facility.

Following the reading of her amusingly titled poem “Ode to the Wrecking Ball,” Davis, with the help of the senior class officers, planted a golden shovel into the ground to officially kick off the construction of the new library, which is scheduled for completion in January 2010. Davis and the entire 2009 senior class then posed for a photograph at the newly broken ground. As a keepsake, Davis was bestowed the golden shovel to commemorate the occasion.