Schools

Montco Girl Achieves 13 Years of Perfect School Attendance

Recent high school grad Sammi Gerhard worked hard to meet her goal of perfect attendance from kindergarten through 12th grade.

Original reporting by Nicole Foulke

Ambler resident Sammi Gerhard, at 17 years of age, has accomplished something that many schoolchildren did not attempt to do because it seems, well, impossible; but Gerhard has achieved a perfect attendance record in June for her 13 years in school.

It took discipline.  She missed her older sister’s graduation.  She missed her loved ones’ funerals.  She missed a Tim McGraw concert that everybody else was able to see.

Gerhard did not march into kindergarten with a goal of perfect attendance.  Still, it did begin that year, because of her kindergarten teacher.  “I loved seeing her, and I never wanted to miss a day.  At the end of the school year they just gave me a certificate,” Gerhard said.

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 “I was so proud of myself, and I was like, ‘I want to do this again’,” she said.

For the rest of her years at St. Anthony-St Josephs Elementary School in Ambler, Sammi and her parents Kathy and Richard Gerhard were all enthusiastic as she received attendance certificates year after year.  But by the time Sammi graduated on to Lansdale Catholic High School in Lansdale, her parents began to wonder if she would be able to continue her perfect attendance through the trials and tribulations of high school.

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Sammi made it all the way through, each and every day, and she has a Lansdale Catholic High School plaque to prove it.

Sometimes, she paid a price.  She missed her older sister’s graduation.  She missed funerals for her great-aunts and a funeral for ‘Pop,’ her best friend’s great-grandfather who was like family to her.    

According to her mother Kathy, there would be many times that the family wanted to take a 3-day weekend like some families did, but they had to wait until their daughter’s summer vacation.

There were times that she wanted to give up.  “There was one time this year when I was like ‘Mom, come on.  Come on,’ said Gerhard animatedly, referring to a period where she was watching a close friend go through difficult times and did not want to go to school to face it.

But she would put her uniform on and go in.  Senior year was the most difficult.  There were times like the day of the Tim McGraw concert when almost all of her classmates skipped school to see it.  She missed five senior skip days.

Her close friends cheered her on, but not everyone understood what she was doing.  Some classmates would ask her to eschew class to go to the mall for a senior skip day, which Gerhard would not do.  “They couldn’t wrap their brains around the 13 years of 180-plus days of school that I never missed, they didn’t understand that one day would literally just plummet everything else,” she said.

During her time of perfect attendance, Gerhard led a rich and varied life at school.  While in high school she was involved with the National Honor Society, student government, drum line, drama club, and dance company. 

She is active with the St. Anthony of Padua Parish in Ambler.  This fall she will start her freshman year with a scholarship at Penn State Berks in Reading, where her older sister is a rising junior.

Gerhard plans to major in chemistry and be a physician’s assistant.  She would like to take her physician’s assistant degree and travel and help people in different countries, she said.

Will she miss a class in college?  This remains unknown.  But her mother is proud enough of Gerhard’s 13-year attendance record: “It says a lot about her goals, her personality, her ambitions.  I just think that she’s got her act together.  She’s a good girl.  We’re proud of her accomplishments,” she said.


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