Outstanding Graduates

They write symphonies, save sea turtles, and organize marches against hate and conferences against sexism.

They move audiences to tears with their poetry and captivate hearts with their work in the theater. They are scholars, reading voraciously, wrestling with great ideas, impressing top colleges with their intellect. A few have recovered from a difficult start in life to find success in school and a future in college. Others have given to the community with unmatched compassion and little thought of reward or recognition.

They are the 16 students we have chosen this year to be Outstanding Graduates. They are teenagers whose contributions have made the region a better place to live.

Every year, The Seattle Times solicits nominations from the community for outstanding graduating high-school seniors. This year, we received nearly 300 nominations. Choosing among so many bright, talented teens was difficult; we could have chosen three times as many, and all would have been as good.

Here are the ones who impressed us the most.

Christina Wallace

NOVA Alternative High School, Seattle

Award-winning painter and photographer. Straight-A student. Social activist and organizer. Dancer and musician. International traveler. Gifted poet.

On paper, Christina Wallace, 18, a senior at NOVA Alternative High School in Seattle, sounds like a modern Renaissance woman, with abundant artistic talent and academic promise.

In person, Wallace is warm and intense, passionate about her causes and driven to make a difference.

Her high-school adviser, Barbara Osborne, said Wallace's many sides make her a standout.

In fact, when Osborne showed a friend the recommendation she wrote for Wallace's college applications, the friend feared college officials wouldn't believe it.

"There's the intensely academic part of her, but there's also the fabulous artist, the intense poet, the excellent piano player and a person with a really good heart," Osborne said.

Wallace said she's been an artist all her life, doing drawings, working with metal, creating jewelry. But it wasn't until last winter that she started painting. Several months later, a collection of her paintings and one photograph won first place in the Seattle School District's annual Naramore Portfolio Exhibit.

Wallace's portfolio included a study of two nudes, a golden-haloed woman in the icon tradition of the Greek Orthodox church, of which she is a member, and a self-portrait.

Wallace's poetry is "searching and soulful," Osborne said. At one reading this year, a parent was so moved by Wallace's poems she made a $500 donation to the school.

"Poetry has helped me find my voice," Wallace said.

"What I've learned over the past few years about art is that it's about sharing things between humans that they don't know how to say in other ways," she said. "It's about finding the humanity between people."

The voice Wallace has honed through her art she channels into expressing her social conscience.

As a freshman, she researched the issue of sexism in schools after a friend was sexually harassed. She gathered data on harassment, then presented the information to then-Superintendent John Stanford and a group of senior district staff members.

Not satisfied with the response, she organized a young women's conference to address the subject. That conference is now in its fourth year; last year it attracted 125 young people, who attended seminars on everything from women in the prison and sex industries to training in community activism.

Wallace also was one of many young activists demonstrating during the World Trade Organization protests in Seattle, an event made more personal because of her travels in several developing countries.

Last year she took a semester off and traveled solo to six countries, including Guatemala and Cuba, the culmination of several years of planning and saving.

Wallace is considering attending either the University of California, Berkeley, or Eugene Lang College in New York City. She can see herself as a paid political organizer, a social scientist, or a professor or researcher. But she's not ruling out the arts, either. And if she can find a way to weave it all together somehow, she said, so much the better.

- Jolayne Houtz

Nathan Yee

Lynnwood High School

At 18, Nathan Yee knows that the business of conducting requires more than just waving a stick and bathing in the glory of applause.

There are the countless hours of practice, perfecting the note that can make or break a performance. There's the delicate task of making suggestions to his peers on how to improve the score. But the most important moment of rehearsal comes when a fellow student tells him that his interpretation of the music is wrong.

"I know it sounds funny because I like to succeed," said Yee, Lynnwood High School's self-effacing valedictorian. "It reminds you that you aren't perfect, and it means that they're thinking. Not being perfect and teaching go hand in hand."

Yee, who fell in love with the trombone when he was 11, took over the responsibilities of directing rehearsals and conducting for the school's orchestra, band, and wind and jazz ensembles when the group's instructor injured her back in February.

He had little experience conducting but ended up directing several spring performances and, in one event, leading the orchestra before an audience of 600 people.

Lesley Moffat, director of Lynnwood High School's bands and orchestra department, was impressed with Yee's maturity. It took her years to realize what Yee has learned about being a teacher and a leader over the past few months, she said. But she wasn't surprised.

Yee's fellow musicians have been impressed with his maturity, too. The 152 students in the instrumental-music department voted overwhelmingly to give Yee the Louis Armstrong Jazz Award and the Arion Award, both of which honor a student for leadership and outstanding musical abilities. They also voted Yee the most inspirational music student, and the parent booster club chose him as Male Musician of the Year.

Throughout his high-school career, Yee, who has a 4.0 grade-point average, has always leapt at chances to learn and excel, Moffat said.

Though he was born in Seattle, English is a second language for Yee, whose parents immigrated from China. When he became fluent in English, he kept up his first language by swapping English words and phrases for similar Cantonese expressions from his mother.

He plans to study music at the University of Washington and may pursue a teaching career.

What makes Yee a standout, Moffat said, is not solely his ambition, but the compassion he extends toward others. He's a peer counselor who promises an empathetic ear to his fellow students. He is a member of Link Crew, a group of students who help freshmen adjust to high school.

With Moffat and his fellow musicians, Yee has played for numerous charity events and has always made room in his crammed schedule to play at the Aldercrest Nursing Home.

His reward: witnessing the power of sound, of a single tune, a jazz standard from the 1950s or '60s perhaps, that, played just so, can unravel decades-old memories.

"That's when you've got to smile," Yee said. "You just made that person's day."

- Keiko Morris

Aaron Pyon

Decatur High School, Federal Way

Aaron Pyon sifts through his juvenile-court records. He keeps them in a lightweight folder, the kind most students use for their senior portfolio.

It's sort of a scrapbook of how he survived after being abandoned in a trailer at age 13: Gang association. Drugs. Residential burglaries. Multiple counts of auto theft.

"I hurt a lot of people - I was being selfish," explained the 17-year-old. "But I also needed the money. I had nobody.

"It was just a bad time in my life."

Three years ago, Pyon moved into a foster home run by Ron Gintz, former mayor of Federal Way. It's where he learned structure, boundaries and responsibility, the teen said.

As part of the arrangement, Pyon made a mass confession of every crime he remembered taking part in. He was eventually convicted of 13 felonies and ordered to pay nearly $10,000 in restitution. He has since paid off his debt by working at a golf course as a waiter.

The confession "closed that chapter of my life," he said, giving him a fresh start.

Pyon attended summer school and took extra courses so he could graduate on time. Even though he suffers from attention-deficit disorder, he maintained a 3.3 grade-point average while holding down a part-time waiter's job.

He's logged almost 300 hours of community service, far more than what was required by the court.

Pyon plans to study business and technology at Western Washington University this fall on a $2,000-a-quarter scholarship.

"I want to feel success, and I want to find out where I fall in," he said. "I know I'm capable of a lot of good stuff."

Decatur Principal Jerry Millett said Pyon "has turned his life around 180 degrees."

"I think he went the farthest afield, and came back father than most kids could," Millett said. ". . . His emergence has been remarkable."

Pyon grinned when asked whether he ever thought he'd be applying for scholarships and college.

"I always thought I'd be applying for parole," he said, chuckling.

- Lisa Pemberton-Butler

Cameron Shaughnessy

Bellevue High School

Harvard offered him a spot on its football team, but Cameron Shaughnessy turned it down. The Bellevue senior didn't feel comfortable about accepting the spot because he knew his heart wasn't in the gridiron.

Football "is not my passion," said Shaughnessy, who will attend the University of Washington Honors Program instead. If he had taken the Harvard spot, "I would be divesting someone else of the opportunity to go there."

A starting safety and running back who sports a 3.9 grade-point average, Shaughnessy is more interested in hitting the books than hitting the field.

He takes honors classes, reads philosophy and literature in his spare time, and quotes Kurt Vonnegut and William Shakespeare.

So passionate is he about the written language that Shaughnessy takes his Webster's Dictionary with him when he's driving around in his mother's Ford Explorer, often stopping by Barnes & Noble to check out the books at the half-off table.

"I remember once last summer, after workout, he had been reading `Paradise Lost,' a book on Faust and an Eastern philosophy book, and this was all in one day," said Spencer Welch, an assistant football coach. "This was a recurring theme with him. He's such an avid reader. He's so intellectually inclined."

So much so that the 18-year-old cleared out the family's tool shed and converted it into a reading room so he wouldn't be distracted by phone calls.

He rarely watches television, finding his muse instead in the works of Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson and other transcendentalists.

Books, Shaughnessy said, "can tell us something about ourselves and our society that we have not considered."

As impressive as he is in school - he was co-captain of the football team and senior prom king - his teachers and peers speak just as highly of his character.

Last summer Shaughnessy received $100 for helping out at a summer football camp, but he donated the stipend to the local Boys & Girls Club instead. Shaughnessy never boasted about his good deed, which would have gone unnoticed if someone hadn't mentioned it to his coaches.

"He's so humble," said Welch. His parents and teachers wonder what other good deeds he has done in private.

- Tan Vinh

Kassandra Wood

Everett Alternatives High School

Kassandra Wood didn't tell her parents she was pregnant until she was two months from giving birth.

Almost two years later, Wood has made it her business to tell complete strangers about her life. She talks to teens and lays down a road map - the how-to guide to avoid the situation she found herself in as a frightened 15-year-old. She tells them about the myriad forms of birth control available. She talks to them about the lost sleep, the bills and a life revolving around the best mistake she ever made, her son Adrian.

"When I started looking for a job and an apartment, I realized that I needed an education to get a job," said Wood, a senior at Everett Alternatives High School. "I needed someone like Adrian to make me realize it was time to get my crap together."

Wood has had a rocky life filled with drugs, rebellion, hopelessness and suicide attempts. She was the tough girl who started smoking when she was 10, and today she might be the teen you stare at in the grocery store thinking, "She's too young to have a baby."

Wood talks frankly and with confidence about all of this because she knows there's a lot that people don't see. Her principal and teachers say she's a role model for other teen mothers - managing the stresses of keeping up with high-school and college courses, and with an active 21-month-old boy. She's a loving sister, they say, who helps care for her developmentally delayed 14-year-old brother.

Since she began at Everett Alternatives, Wood has come out of her shell, said Christina Byers, the school's day-care coordinator and an early-childhood specialist. Wood talked to several classes at Cascade High School about her life as a teen mother, the discrimination, isolation and the large responsibilities that made her grow up in a hurry. Now she's hoping to put together a teen-parent panel with Planned Parenthood to educate her peers.

"I see all these moms at this school, some girls that are 12 years old," Wood said. "There are a lot of people who are so not ready to have a baby. My point that I wanted to get across was don't have sex. But if you are, there are 17 methods of birth control. Pick one."

Wood said she's lucky. Her parents help support her and care for her son when she goes to work at a pharmacy. Her boyfriend stuck with her, and they're now engaged. She's found a church whose members don't give fake smiles and condescending glances.

With scholarships, Wood plans to attend Everett Community College and eventually graduate school to earn a master's degree in social work.

After having Adrian, she doesn't quit anything, she said. She doesn't take the easy way out.

- Keiko Morris

Halimah Mohamed

Chief Sealth High School, Seattle

When Halimah Mohamed emigrated from Kenya in fall 1996, she was a shy, quiet girl who spoke little English.

Today, the 17-year-old still describes herself as shy. But she speaks confidently about her aspirations to become a pediatrician.

"I want to work with kids," she said.

She's had plenty of practice so far. Mohamed is now one of the most popular tutors at the Rotary Boys & Girls Club, where she herself was once tutored as a student struggling with English.

"I used to be so quiet that if someone said something, I'd nod my head," she recalled. "If I said something, they'd laugh because my English is not so good."

A native of Uganda, Mohamed's family fled military conflict and moved to Kenya when she was a year old. Her father emigrated to the United States in 1992, and the family followed four years later. Mohamed said she realized in Kenya that education largely determines your lot in life.

"If you went to school, that means you are doing something with your life," she said. "If you don't have education, your life is not going to be good. It's not even going to be OK."

When Mohamed started at Chief Sealth High School, she struggled with English. But with practice, she was able to move out of English-as-a-second-language classes. Her grades now consistently place her on the honor roll. And she used her own experiences as a student learning English to help the nonnative English speakers she tutored at the Rotary Boys & Girls Club.

"She talked to me a lot about being shy with her English, but she refined it in conversation," said the club's executive director, Stephan Blanford, who nominated her as an outstanding graduate.

Outside of schoolwork, Mohamed sings in Chief Sealth's choir, which performed at Benaroya Hall in December for former South African President Nelson Mandela. In May, Mohamed traveled with the choir to New York, where the students performed in Carnegie Hall.

Mohamed also volunteered at St. Mary's Food Bank every Sunday. Although she stopped volunteering there last May, she still helps people. Since October, she has been a mentor to students at Denny Middle School.

"She's a good person who wants to do good things for other people," Blanford said.

- Frank Vinluan

Jacob Fisher

Tyee High School, SeaTac

From a supporting role as the farmer in "Three Little Pigs" to the lead in two sold-out performances of "The Janitor," Jacob Fisher's passion is clearly theater.

He loves acting, directing and designing props. He even has a script of his own in the works.

But even though he's basked in the warmth of a spotlight on stage, the 18-year-old has never heard the cheers of an audience.

He's lived in a world of silence since age 2, when he was stricken with spinal meningitis. Doctors gave him heavy doses of penicillin, and the medicine left him deaf.

Fisher's parents immediately signed him up for a deaf preschool. They took classes, too, so they could learn to communicate with him.

At age 4, Fisher met his mentor, actor and director Billy Seago, at a statewide conference on childhood deafness. Seago selected Fisher to play a role in "The House that Jack Built."

After his first taste of fame, he was addicted.

Fisher has worked with the Deaf Youth Drama Project at the Seattle Children's Theatre since elementary school, performing in more than a dozen plays.

He says he likes theater because it brings out emotion.

"I like to make people laugh or cry if they want to," Fisher signed through an interpreter.

He's taken an active role in Tyee High School's deaf community, serving as co-editor of the school's Deaf and Hard of Hearing newsletter and secretary of the Tyee Sign Language Club.

Last year he played Santa Claus for deaf and hearing-impaired students at Bow Lake Elementary School in SeaTac.

Fisher doesn't let physical challenges hold him up. He's lettered in football, swimming and wrestling, and takes as many "mainstream" courses as possible, from Shakespeare to driver's ed.

His favorite hobbies are cooking and hiking.

Fisher plans to attend Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C., this fall and study theater. He also wants to earn a degree in culinary arts.

His long-term goal is to return to Seattle and work with Seago at the Children's Theatre.

- Lisa Pemberton-Butler

Kelly Lisbakken

Mercer Island High School

Kelly Lisbakken has a 4.0 grade-point average and scored a perfect 1600 on her SAT.

She took every honors class offered at Mercer Island High, even cramming nine classes into a seven-period day one year. When she ran out of math classes to take, she picked up calculus at Bellevue Community College.

One summer, she attended Oxford University and got A's in molecular medicine and economics and politics.

Even at a school filled with high achievers, Lisbakken is a standout. Want to follow her fast-paced life? Bring plenty of coffee.

She gets up at 5 a.m. to attend seminary class at a Mormon church. She often packs nine classes into a seven-period day, partly by skipping lunch.

She starts on three soccer teams and drives to Tacoma after school to practice with one of them. Her soccer skills are so strong that a dozen college coaches have recruited her.

For pleasure she enjoys fashion design, and her work took fourth place at the Distributive Education Clubs of America (DECA) Nationals in the fashion-promotion category last year.

"There are so many people with ridiculous potential, but it comes down to what you are willing to put in," said Lisbakken, who will attend Princeton, where she wants to double-major in computer and chemical engineering, minor in astrophysics, and play soccer.

Her parents once sat her down in the living room and advised her to slow down. Now, her parents say they know better.

"She's unhappy when she doesn't have a full schedule," said her mother, Linda Lisbakken. "Wherever she goes, she carries at least one book. If there is downtime, she reads."

On her birthday last June, Lisbakken was in Houston for a national soccer tournament. She took the SAT in the morning, left with a perfect score, grabbed a ham sandwich and made it in time for her match.

Burned out yet? Hardly, she said.

"I take joy in everything I do in life," the 17-year-old said. "I mean, as soon as you start getting unhappy, then it becomes painful and frustrating."

- Tan Vinh

Leo Danaher

O'Dea High School, Seattle

Leo Danaher was in elementary school when he chose his college and mapped out his career.

The moment that changed the course of his life came at the end of a U.S. Coast Guard Academy graduation, as he watched the excited graduates toss their hats into the air. Danaher decided on the spot he would be a Coast Guard cadet, and he hasn't deviated from that course.

Since then, he learned everything he could about the Coast Guard and asked his family to take him to every Coast Guard station from San Diego to Alaska. He even had the Coast Guard in mind when he chose to attend Seattle's O'Dea High School - Danaher was impressed not only by the school's academic program and extracurricular activities, but also because it had sent three graduates to the Coast Guard Academy in a single year.

Last summer Danaher got a taste of the Coast Guard Academy's basic training by enrolling in its Academy Introductory Mission. His single-minded devotion to a Coast Guard career paid off: Out of 7,000 applicants to the academy, he was one of 400 selected.

One of nine O'Dea students who make the long commute by ferry from Bremerton, Danaher has earned a 3.79 grade-point average while running track for three years and winning varsity letters on the cross-country team for four years. He was the cross-country team captain this year.

Danaher is a member of the campus ministry program, helping to run freshman and sophomore retreats and assisting at school Masses and prayer services.

He also is an Eagle Scout and assistant scoutmaster of a Bremerton Boy Scout troop.

"He never quits. He's almost too good to be real. Sometimes I think he's 17 going on 50 - a pleasurable young man to be around," said one of his teachers, O'Dea social-studies department chairman Earl Hanley.

His life's course might have been different, Danaher mused, if his family had once lived closer to the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., than to the Coast Guard Academy in New London, Conn. His father, Tom, was a Navy captain who commissioned and commanded the fast-combat support ship Rainier before retiring in 1996.

One advantage of the Coast Guard is that an officer is likely to take command of a ship much more quickly - perhaps in four years instead of 15. And then there's the Coast Guard's status as a nonmilitary organization under Department of Transportation command only in peacetime.

"Rather than practicing for something we hope never happens - war - the Coast Guard gets to do a lot of other things that help everyday people," Danaher explained.

- Keith Ervin

Leah Montange

Shorewood High School, Shoreline

Leah Montange knows what she likes: the low sound of the baritone sax, Ella Fitzgerald and Duke Ellington, theater and the ruminations of Francis Bacon.

And she knows what she wants to change, such as discrimination and the apathy and complacency that keeps people in their places. Even when the Shorewood High School senior was struggling with fatigue caused by chemotherapy, when she wasn't sure how much longer she would live, she forced herself to care.

"I really had to battle with apathy," Montange said. "I had to make a conscious effort to think about those things, injustice. I would read things that I had written about. I would read the paper. I really wanted it to matter."

Since her freshman year, Montange has engaged her fellow classmates in discussions about sexism, racism, heterosexism and economic discrimination. She has conducted workshops with others in a club called Creating a World of Difference. She wanted other students to think about the ways they assigned status by judging people from their appearances and clothes.

Montange is known for her persistence, said Rick Robbins, Shorewood's principal and honors philosophy teacher. In 1998, when she was undergoing treatment for a tumor discovered growing from her liver, Montange rarely missed classes or activities.

A day after one chemotherapy session, Montange took the Preliminary Scholastic Aptitude Test and made the highest score - 224 - recorded in Shorewood High School's history.

Montange, a National Merit finalist, made it through months of gulping down 40 pills a day and surgery to remove a 10-pound tumor. It was an experience that prepared her for death. But in the past year and a half, she has been getting on with the business of life.

A baritone sax player with the jazz ensemble, Montange and her classmates performed before legendary jazz musicians at Lincoln Center's highly selective Essentially Ellington competition last month. She's spent the last month in a flurry of writing final papers, directing a one-act play and taking Advanced Placement tests. This fall she will attend New York University, where she plans to study philosophy.

One of her fondest memories of her senior year is the day she and other members of Creating a World of Difference pulled off a "Stop the Hate" march in Shoreline. Up until two days before the march, Montange wasn't sure whether the district's insurance policy would cover the event or whether the group would have the proper permits in hand.

"When we were marching, I looked back, and there were so many people behind us," Montange said. "People were dancing. People were having a good time. It just made me think we were a success."

- Keiko Morris

Charles Ridlon

Bothell High School

Perhaps the best way to appreciate Charles Ridlon is to realize he doesn't have to be at the school's car shop every afternoon, helping first-year mechanic students through the trials and tribulations of fixing their first car.

Every day at 12:30 p.m., the Bothell High senior volunteers in the beginning-shop class, showing students how to fix a transmission or grading papers so shop teacher Doug Angell has more time to teach.

"I didn't ask him - he just showed up one day," Angell said.

"With Doug being the only teacher, it's hard for the young students to get (one-on-one) attention. It can get frustrating," Ridlon said.

Ridlon is considered one of the top student mechanics in the state, having scored high enough on a written test to compete recently in a national car-troubleshooting competition in New York City that was sponsored by the the Greater New York Automobile Dealers Association.

His legacy, though, will be more what he has done for the shop than what he has done under the hood. The 18-year-old Bothell resident spent his senior year building a "testing aid" engine.

Ridlon took an engine out of a GMC van, welded it onto a cart and wired it so that students can diagnose each part. Now students in the Northshore School District will have a model engine to work with.

He recently completed the project and now spends more of his free time working with other first-year shop students, showing them how to fix brakes or lift a hoist.

Ridlon has great passion for the craft and this shop. His father Mike, a former mechanic, is also a graduate of Bothell High and honed his skills in this same shop.

His teachers say Ridlon has been transformed from a shy, sit-in-the-back-of-the-classroom student to a leader, mentor and teacher.

English teacher Jill Skog marvels over how hard he's worked to improve his speaking skills. He's the president of the school's Vocational Instruction Clubs of America, organizing meetings and hosting events - not bad for someone who used to shake and stutter during public speaking.

"All other kids really respect him," said Skog. He's a great mechanic, she added, but even a better student for wanting to learn and helping his peers.

- Tan Vinh

Mai Bui

International School, Bellevue

Her junior-high adviser warned Mai Bui that Bellevue's rigorous International School might be too hard, especially because she spoke little English and the accelerated school does not offer English-as-a-second-language classes.

Mai Bui considered it a challenge.

Come June, this Vietnamese immigrant who spoke no English a few years ago will graduate from the International School with a 3.8 grade-point average.

"She didn't know a word of English, and she's now one of our top students," said school counselor Mary Beth Gunson. "It's truly amazing and inspirational."

It wasn't easy. The 17-year-old remembers feeling overwhelmed during a ninth-grade humanities class when the teacher expounded on the works of Aristotle.

"I was like, `Oh, no. What did I get myself into?' I knew it was hard. I didn't realize it was that hard,' " Bui said.

But quitting, she said, was never an option, even when she spent five hours writing short essays that took her classmates only an hour to write.

So she out-worked everyone to catch up. She picked her classmates' brains. She visited her teachers after school for tutoring.

She practiced English with anyone who would listen and studied the conversations of her classmates.

"Whereas most kids would feel sorry for themselves and give up, that's not her," said Gunson. "Our curriculum is very rigorous, but Mai has volunteered to take some of our most difficult courses, such as honors humanities, AP (Advanced Placement) calculus and AP history."

Bui, who grew up in a village and didn't see an escalator until she immigrated here six years ago, now speaks flawless English.

She will attend Seattle University with academic scholarships and financial aid. She is saving money earned at her part-time job at Sears to go to medical school.

She is also giving back to the community - by starting a mentoring program for Vietnamese students on the Eastside so that other immigrants will have an easier time adjusting.

"When I got here, I didn't know anyone to ask homework questions, and my parents didn't speak English," she said. "So I want other (immigrants) to have someone they could ask for help, someone who could be a positive role model and help them adapt to the culture and get them to stay in school."

- Tan Vinh

Megan Kruse

Marysville-Pilchuk High School

Megan Krusesigned up for the YMCA's Earth Service Corps, looking for an activity to fill her spare time. What she found was a mission for life.

Kruse, a Marysville-Pilchuk High School senior, has spent the past several years rebuilding greener, fish-friendly environs, saving sea turtles in Mexico and nurturing abused animals. When she's not talking about the environment, she's writing about it in Edge, the youth section of Everett's Herald newspaper.

She wants people to realize the effect they have on the Earth - or at least to stop and think about where their food comes from.

"We are so disconnected with where our resources and products come from," Kruse said. "We have enough resources to make a positive impact on the environment. We have the affluence to change the global environment, but we're spending our money on material things."

Kruse, a vegan in a meat-and-potatoes world, has always had "green" leanings. But a trip to Mexico City and Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, last August profoundly changed her vision of the world.

Traveling with other teens from the YMCA, Kruse spent three weeks reburying sea-turtle eggs to protect them from natural predators and shuttling newborn turtles to the sea. The turtles, which hatch at night, make their way to the brightest light. And these days the brightest light is not reflected off the water but from coastal cities, Kruse said.

The group also nursed an adult turtle that was injured when its legs became tangled in a plastic bag. The odds are stacked against sea turtles, Kruse said. On top of natural predators, poachers hunt their eggs to sell as a delicacy, and their shells to make fashionable purses. Mexicans take the sea turtles for granted, the way Pacific Northwesterners take the forests for granted, Kruse said.

"I don't think I fully understood how much we impact each other until this trip," Kruse said. "With that injured turtle, I saw how just one bag of plastic can hurt a turtle."

Kruse, who is co-president of her high-school environmental club and a board member of the Everett YMCA, has her hand in a number of local environmental groups and youth activities, including Everett Community College's Environment Watch!, the Girl Scouts, replanting projects and Pig's Peace Sanctuary, a haven for abandoned potbellied pigs.

A high achiever and a National Merit Scholar, Kruse plans to attend Oberlin College in Ohio, where she hopes to explore other environmental issues.

The more she becomes involved, the more disparities and inequalities she wants to change. At this point, she said, it's impossible to stop.

- Keiko Morris

Jesse Session

Kentwood High School, Covington

He's won public-speaking awards in Future Business Leaders of America, worked as a door-to-door salesman for a newspaper and performed numerous hip-hop dance routines for school assemblies.

But although Kentwood High School senior Jesse Session loves being in the spotlight, it's not easy for him to perform in front of people, he said.

"I'm more shy than I seem," said the 18-year-old, who sports multiple body piercings. "It's hard for me to get out there, but that's something I'm trying to get over."

Session has been hip-hop dancing since junior-high school. At the suggestion of his mother, he enrolled at classes from the Ewajo Dance Workshop in Seattle, which combines traditional African and urban street dance.

That's where he also studied basic ballet, which he described as the "base of hip-hop."

Although he enjoys performing, Session isn't seriously considering it as a career right now. He plans to attend the University of Washington and study biology and pre-medicine.

Session said he's interested in becoming an obstetrician and has asked a few of his pregnant friends if he could join them in the delivery room to witness "the whole birth thing."

"I just like the way life comes into the world," he said. ". . . It amazes me."

At Kentwood, Session is a peer mediator and a student counselor. He also helped organize Shades, a multicultural-awareness club.

In addition to sponsoring a culture week, the group plans special meals and entertainment for the various cultural holidays around the year.

- Lisa Pemberton-Butler

Jessica Lewellen

Nathan Hale High School, Seattle

In a piece Jessica Lewellen wrote for her high-school band, she turns the usual musical hierarchies upside down by letting the bass instruments play the melody.

It was a deliberate attempt to make a point: Everyone should have a chance to shine.

For several years, Lewellen didn't think she'd have that chance. In middle school, her classmates ridiculed her for her muddled speech and high-pitched voice, both caused by a childhood illness. She drifted from group to group, trying to fit in. She felt worthless and let her grades slip.

The summer before high school, Lewellen decided to change. She returned to speech therapy so she could be easily understood. She entered Nathan Hale High School with a new attitude, new energy.

Four years later, she's a top student with a 3.9 grade-point average and a number of other achievements.

She's competed twice in the Junior Olympics in saber fencing, which she started because her father did it and wanted her to try it. This year she qualified for the women's national championships. She loves the sport so much she applied only to colleges where she'd have access to a good fencing program. She settled on the University of Washington, where she'll continue training with her present instructor while she studies to be a veterinarian.

On many weekends, Lewellen dons a full set of armor and brandishes a sword and shield for Clan Carn, a group associated with the Society for Creative Anachronism.

"It's aggressive. It's strong. It's powerful," she said. "It's fun, and you get to strike guys!"

Lewellen's passions include animals, and she's long raised and trained Great Danes. She works after school at the Northeast Veterinary Clinic and, for a junior-year project, helped find homes for more than 100 abused or neglected pets.

And then there's music, which she relied on as a child to best express her emotions. She composes music and plays five instruments, including the bagpipes. Her piece for the Nathan Hale band - her senior project - is scheduled to be performed Friday.

She could have written something much simpler, but she wanted to challenge herself. Titled "The Wheel," it's a piece of modern music that continually returns to its theme.

And it shines the light on musicians who usually toil in the background, a reflection of some of her hard-won wisdom.

"The Joe Jocks and the peppy cheerleaders . . . yes, they're great, and they should shine. But so should other people."

Her sword-fighting friends call her the "rabid weasel."

"I keep going," Lewellen said. "I never give up."

- Linda Shaw

Natasha Jaksich

Lindbergh High School, Renton

Natasha Jaksich wasn't about to let Lindbergh High's nearly decade-old ban against student-run newspapers stop her from practicing First Amendment rights.

Inspired by an episode of television's "Home Improvement," in which one of the Taylor boys starts a school newspaper, the bubbly teen inquired about launching a student publication at Lindbergh.

Her idea was quickly shot down.

"All of the teachers were leery," she said, noting that many were still upset about offensive articles in an underground newspaper that was distributed at the school in 1983. "Nobody wanted to take the project on."

But Jaksich kept lobbying teachers and administrators.

She presented a petition signed by more than 100 students. And instead of creating a journalism class, the 18-year-old proposed that the student paper operate out of the school's existing business-communications class.

The presses - er, copy machines - began rolling last year, and several issues were published. But then, the business-communications class was canceled this school year.

Jaksich, a 3.94-grade-point student who also played varsity tennis, refused to let "her dream" die. She conducted a schoolwide survey to measure student interest, found a teacher to volunteer as adviser and persuaded administrators to permit the paper to continue as an after-school club.

Nearly 30 students help publish the monthly newsletter, which is printed on white office paper. Many students submit poetry or other writings, Jaksich said.

Jaksich, who plans to attend Bellevue Community College before transferring to Western Washington University to study journalism, said it will be difficult to hand over her duties as editor in chief.

But she hopes the paper, called Eagle Voices, becomes a Lindbergh tradition.

"The student interest is there," she said. "(The students) want something to represent their opinion. . . . They say, `Why didn't someone start this sooner?' "

- Lisa Pemberton-Butler

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Each spring, The Seattle Times solicits nominations from principals, teachers and the community for outstanding high-school graduates. The nominees have some or all of these special traits: They set goals and high expectations and achieved them; they are creative or artistic; they demonstrate leadership; they show kindness and compassion for others; and they exude passion. This year's winners were chosen by Times education reporters Keith Ervin, Jolayne Houtz, Keiko Morris, Lisa Pemberton-Butler, Linda Shaw and Tan Vinh. The project was coordinated by Katherine Long, The Seattle Times School Guide editor.

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