Adviser’s Note:  Here is the student speech of gratitude delivered at Tritonfest Saturday night, Feb. 1.

Good evening everyone! My name is Arnol Castellanos Perez. I’m currently a junior here at Notre Dame Academy. I would like to start off by saying thank you. I would like to thank God, my family in particular (my cousin who’s here tonight, little sister who’s also here tonight, my mother who’s also here tonight, and my grandma, who I know that if she’d be here tonight she’d be in tears). 

I would also like to thank the school, the teachers, Father Jordan, who has been a mentor with my faith and journey with God, and another teacher in particular too, Sra. Stover.  Without this teacher I don’t know what would’ve happened to me my freshman year. Mrs. Anderson, without her I wouldn’t have passed my math class my freshman year. I would also like to thank every single one of you guys that are here today. Without you I wouldn’t be here right now. I wouldn’t be at this school or have the education I have right now. 

When I was about five years old, my father abandoned me, my little sister, and my mother. After that my mother had to raise me and my little sister all by herself. I hated my father for a long time, I hated him with a passion. I hated him the most for how he had left me. I even hated myself for a while for how much I hated him. But getting closer to God helped me forgive him, but thanks to your donations I’m able to come to this school, and being able to come to this school helped me get closer to Christ, and getting closer to Christ I was able to forgive my father. 

They once asked me, “Who’s your greatest influence?” I remember saying it’s my fathers absence, my father’s void, that’s my greatest influence. Thanks to what I once saw as the worst thing on earth, I am the person I am today. My father leaving is how I got to be who I am today. 

When I was younger, people would ask me what I wanted to be when I was older, and I would always respond by saying these two things: Doctor, or Detective. Doctor was something I always looked into, and detective was because I would ask a thousand questions. I would ask everything non-stop. My mother and my grandma would always say, “You would be a great detective because of how many questions you ask.”

You know how they say, “Junior year is going to be your hardest year,” but for me I always say it was freshman year.

I remember coming into my freshman year was like a whole new chapter in my life. I got into a school where I knew some students, knew no teachers, and joined the soccer team (which meant soccer everyday after school), homework everyday, test every week or every two weeks, and I had also gotten a job. And even though when I was younger, I thought I “knew” what I wanted to do when I got older, coming into high school they would ask me what I wanted to be after high school and I couldn’t even respond to it. 

Everything during that time was new to me, I didn’t know how to react to it or take it in. So I got really really bad anxiety; I would get really anxious and nervous. One, by not knowing what I would do after high school, and another because of how busy my life had gotten and how much I had going on at the time. It was something I had never gone through. And I remember I failed the same math test twice after studying too, but it was because of how nervous and scared I was, to the point I couldn’t even focus or be myself. And I remember Sra. Stover was my first-hour teacher, and she would notice I was anxious, scared, not being myself. She talked to Mrs. Anderson to see if I could take the test a third time since I had been suffering from anxiety, and she let me retake it. 

So when it comes toward the third time, I missed a soccer game the night before to study and make sure I did well on it. I told Sra. Stover I missed a whole soccer game studying for this test, and she wasn’t too happy about it.  She told me, “You let your teammates and coaches down.”  She told Mrs. Anderson what I had done by missing a whole soccer game for it. And I remember it like yesterday, Mrs. Anderson told me, “I don’t want you to ever miss a soccer game or practice for one of my tests, I will always help you.” From that day forward I knew that each and every single one of these teachers and counselors had my back and that I could count on them. 

Sra. Stover made sure that everyday I was doing good, making improvement on my anxiety, going out of her way to check up on me and making sure I’m good. 

Then comes my junior year of high school. I was able to figure out what I LOVE to do and what I want to be. I heard one of the greatest quotes I ever heard in my life, from Neil deGrasse Tyson, and the quote goes like this: “Pick something you will do for free and make that your career and you won’t ever work a day in your life.” I remember I thought about it for days and couldn’t even sleep because of it. . .until I figured it out.

And it was the Public Performance class I took that helped me figure it out since I fell in love with public speaking. Someone came to me and said, “Who do you want to be when you grow up?  What do you want to be?” And I said, “I want to be a father to many, an inspirational speaker, inspire others, be an inspiration to others, help them write their own stories, tell them that they also have their own stories to be heard.” 

So you see this school completely transformed my life into someone I never thought I would ever be, but there’s no way on this planet earth I would have ever been able to figure this out and be the person I am today without God, of course, but also without each and every single one of you that’s here tonight. 

Your donations aren’t just donations, they are blessings, to not just me, but to every student that is blessed with receiving part of those donations for their education. With these donations, that are seen as blessings, I’m able to have a remarkable education, but it’s more than that too. I get to go home after school and see a smile on my mother’s face, her knowing that I couldn’t have been more blessed with a better education and a better school. For that I say thank you. God Bless!