One of the first-ever graduates of Traverse City’s newest high school. An aspiring Broadway actress. A refugee who found safety and educational fulfillment at the Career-Tech Center. They're just a few of Traverse City’s high school class of 2024. With several area schools holding commencement ceremonies this weekend, The Ticker offers its annual spotlight on a few local graduates.

Wyatt Anderson, Greenspire
Profile: A member of Greenspire High School’s inaugural graduating class, Anderson was also the school’s lead student ambassador, taking on responsibilities like leading student tours, interviewing prospective staff, and more. “He is Greenspire’s number-one cheerleader,” says Head of School Erica Marsh. “Because of students like him, Greenspire’s enrollment has tripled in only three short years.” When he wasn’t advocating for Greenspire, Anderson was at the Career-Tech Center studying automotive repair.
Plans: Anderson hopes to attend WyoTech, a Wyoming-based trade school that he describes as “one of the biggest and best automotive industry schools in the nation.”
Highlight: After struggling with dyslexia, ADD, and social anxiety in elementary school, Anderson enrolled at Greenspire in sixth grade. But when COVID-19 sent schools into virtual mode, he spiraled, losing the connections with teachers and friends that had helped him find confidence in the classroom. He credits the inception of Greenspire High School – which in 2021 brought additional grades to the historically 6th-through-8th-grade charter school – with saving his high school experience. “I went from failing four classes and barely scraping by to this new in-person learning environment where my grades, my social skills, my depression, my everything turned around,” he says.

Tristan Bembeneck, Grand Traverse Academy
Profile: Bembeneck took every math class his school had to offer and still wanted more, so he dual-enrolled at Northwestern Michigan College. There, he’s already worked through a slew of college-level math courses, including Calculus I, II, and III and Differential Equations. He finishes high school with a 4.0 GPA and valedictorian status for GTA’s graduating class. Beyond academics, Bembeneck served as treasurer for GTA’s National Honor Society chapter, competed on the cross country team, and participated in band, learning alto saxophone, percussion, and guitar.
Plans: It’s off to Ann Arbor for Bembeneck, who hopes to spend his first year at the University of Michigan exploring different types of engineering. “I am considering aerospace engineering, electrical and computer engineering, and mechanical engineering,” he says. “I love computers, space, rockets, and cars, so to me, all of these sound like amazing fields.”
Highlight: “Our class had a very memorable last day of school this year,” Bembeneck says. “That night at Empire Beach will be something I remember and look back on often.”

Robert Boals, TC Central
Profile: In at least one important way, Boals was the voice of the Trojan Class of 2024. Every day for the past three years, Boals read the morning announcements over the school intercom. He was also an active member of the school’s arts community, serving as violin section leader in Central’s orchestra and vice president for the orchestra council.
Plans: Inspired by both his father (a 32-year Army veteran, and the post commander at the local VFW) and by his own volunteer work (he spent time working with local vets, both at the VFW and through other organizations), Boals has enlisted in the Army and ships out for basic training in August.
Highlight: Last Friday, Boals picked up the microphone to read the morning announcements for the last time. “It was very impactful,” he says of that moment. “To know I saw something through and gave it my best every single day, that was fulfilling. And then afterwards, to hear about how classes stood up and clapped for my final morning announcements, it let me understand how much impact I had on people.”

Addison Booher, TC Central
Profile: For four years, Booher has been jotting down ideas of what to say in a graduation speech, just in case she ever got the chance to give one. She’ll get that chance today: As governor of Central’s Student Senate, Booher will be one of the student speakers at the school’s commencement this afternoon. It’s the capstone on a high school career that also included superb sports performances (Booher played soccer, volleyball, and basketball), strong academics (a 3.84 GPA and a spot in National Honor Society), and a role as a student mentor.
Plans: Booher is off to Bloomington, Indiana to enroll at Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business. She plans to major in marketing and minor in sports media, with hopes of someday working in the NFL.
Highlight: “I’m really proud of being voted student governor by my class,” Booher says – though she also points to crosstown rivalry games in volleyball and soccer as some of her favorite high school moments. “You just have so many people at those games, and the adrenaline is incredible,” she tells The Ticker.

Rebekah Burch, TC Christian
Profile: As TC Christian’s valedictorian, Burch balanced a perfect 4.0 GPA with a schedule that also encompassed student council, three varsity sports (volleyball, bowling, and tennis, including team captaincies for the first two), and volunteer work. In the free time she somehow still has, Burch says she loves “hanging out with my friends and playing lots of pickleball.”
Plans: Come fall, Burch will be at Calvin University in Grand Rapids, where she’ll major in biology with hopes of one day pursuing a career in pathology or microbiology.
Highlight: Despite her academic accomplishments, Burch points to her sporting successes as her proudest high school moments. “For volleyball, I was awarded a position on the 2023 Traverse City Record-Eagle Volleyball Dream Team and I received the Michigan Interscholastic Volleyball Coaches Association Division 4 All-Region Award,” she says. “And for Bowling, I have been a part of two D4 team state championships, one in my freshmen year and one in my senior year.”

Alleah Dix, Grand Traverse Academy
Profile: As salutatorian for the GTA class of 2024, Dix maintained a 4.0 GPA and is graduating high school with 39 college credits to her name. She was also a three-sport athlete for all four years of high school (in cross country, basketball, and track), and this year served as both vice president of her class and vice president of GTA’s National Honor Society chapter.
Plans: A future Wolverine, Dix is headed to the University of Michigan, where she’s been accepted into the prestigious Ross School of Business.
Highlight: “One highlight from high school was in my freshman year, when my cross country team won our regional meet and got to run at the state meet together,” Dix says. “I was also able to go to states again in my junior year, which was an amazing and rewarding experience. I have a really strong relationship with all the girls on my cross-country team, so it was really fun to reach goals together as a team.”

Naomi Elenbaas, TC Christian
Profile: “It's always been very important to me to do the best I can in everything I do,” Elenbaas says, describing the drive that helped earn her salutatorian honors in TC Christian’s class of 2024. She’s also passionate about music – “I’ve played piano for most of my life,” she tells The Ticker – as well as reading, painting, running, and bowling. Recently, Elenbaas played a part in TC Christian’s D4 state title in bowling.
Plans: Elenbaas will enroll at Calvin University in the fall to pursue a degree in chemical engineering, with hopes of one day going on to law school and becoming a patent attorney. “Far into the future, once I have a well-paying job, I hope to travel with my older sister,” she says.
Highlight: While she’s enormously proud of being named salutatorian, Elenbaas jokes that it’s a double-edged sword “because it means I have to give a speech at graduation – an introvert's worst nightmare!”

Charlie Harper, St. Francis
Profile: A four-year player with the Traverse City Alliance Rugby Football Club, Harper helped the team to two consecutive state finals berths. He also played as part of the Bay Reps Varsity Hockey team, and describes himself as “an avid crossfitter who loves to spend time working outdoors on small projects.”
Plans: “After graduation, I plan on attending Purdue University to study integrated business engineering,” Harper shares. “This program is super exciting because it engages my entrepreneurial spirit and love for math and physics. I will also we participating in the Marine Corps NROTC unit and on full academic scholarship.”
Highlight: Harper points to the rigorous application process with the Marine Corps – and the subsequent news that he’d been selected for the aforementioned NROTC scholarship to Purdue – as his favorite moment of high school. “It is a great honor and I was humble to be chosen by the Marine Corps for this prestigious award,” he says, describing the moment he received the news as “the culmination of all my years of hard work.”

Winter Makler, Interlochen
Profile: An oboe player and classical composition major, Makler may never have landed at Interlochen had it not been for the pandemic. “The final push that got me to apply was the online camp during summer 2020,” she says. “I was concerned about how the public school system would handle online classes, and I had just had an amazing time working on my first guided works under the music composition department at camp. Every class I took online had been handled wonderfully.”
Plans: Makler is bound for Oberlin College, with hopes of eventually studying medicine. “While I love music, my time at Interlochen has made me realize that I want to do it for myself, and not be bound by the confines of doing it as a job,” she says.
Highlight: Perhaps fittingly, Makler’s favorite high school experiences were non-music electives – one focused on sustainability, the other on agricultural science. “Every time I went to class, I left with a new thing to ramble on about to my friends, a new experience to laugh about with my classmates, or a new memory to cherish,” she says.

Jake Moore, Interlochen
Profile: After growing up around Interlochen Arts Academy – his mom is a long-time employee – Moore ended up attending the school as a film and new media student. He’s also an Eagle Scout, which he says has recently entailed “working with the Cherry Hill Haven Senior Assisted Living Center, as well as Cherryland Electric, to fundraise, build, and install raised beds for the elderly.”
Plans: Moore will attend Eastern Michigan University on a full-ride scholarship, to major in business. “I love film, but wanted to diversify a bit,” he says. “Since I already have most technical aspects of film down, I felt like majoring in it wouldn’t benefit me as much as going into something broader.”
Highlight: Moore cites coming into his own as a director and “making my crazy ambitious capstone project dreams come true” as his high school highlight. He presented that capstone project – a horror film about a type of mythical creature called a “skinwalker” – at Interlochen’s end-of-the-school-year student showcase. “I was inspired by growing up and having an obsession with things like Bigfoot, ents, yetis, and more,” he says.

Seth Munro, TC West
Profile: A four-year two-sport varsity athlete – hockey and tennis – Munro also maintained a 3.99 unweighted GPA and was an active member of West’s National STEM Honor Society, serving as vice president of the club his junior year and president for the past year. Outside of school, he made inroads to his eventual career goal – becoming an orthopedic surgeon – by interning with two local orthopedic hand surgeons.
Plans: Munro’s career goals put him on a path toward medical school. First, though, he’ll enroll at the University of Michigan for undergrad, joining the school’s College of Engineering for a major in biomedical engineering.
Highlight: “The memory that sticks out to me the most is the moment when the buzzer went off our first time playing Central this past season,” Munro says, referring to the Titan hockey team’s 2-1 victory over their crosstown rivals in December. “We hadn't [beaten Central] in many years, and certainly hadn't won in any of the times I had been on the team, so that was a major accomplishment and was something that I still look back on.”

Isabel Seymour, TC Central
Profile: A star in the local youth arts scene, Seymour played the lead roles in Central’s last three musical productions (Reno Sweeney in Anything Goes, The Baker’s Wife in Into the Woods, and Polly in Crazy for You), sang with the school’s Choral-Aires, and trained six days a week at Dance Arts Academy. She’s also part of National Honor Society, the Students for Environmental Advocacy Club, and a student mentorship group called the Writing Studio.
Plans: Following “a long year of auditioning for lots of musical theater and dance programs,” Seymour committed to the University of Notre Dame, where she’ll double major in business and film, television, and theater. After college, she plans to “get a strong business job in New York” – while also working toward her big break on Broadway.
Highlight: Musical productions – particularly this year’s Anything Goes – represent the best of high school for Seymour. “I was able to establish connections with so many different people across school, and just build really strong bonds throughout that experience. It was amazing having this network of people across the school that I knew supported me.”

Paul Skendzel, St. Francis
Profile: One of St. Francis High School’s “Academic Top 12” for the 2023-24 school year, Skendzel was also among the less than 1 percent of American high school seniors to achieve National Merit Finalist status. Beyond his academics, Skendzel was a three-sport athlete, participating in cross country, golf, and track.
Plans: Last summer, Skendzel followed a passion for mathematics to Michigan Technological University, where he attended a materials science and engineering (MSE) career exploration camp. He loved the experience so much that he plans to return to Michigan Tech in the fall – this time as a full-time college student – to pursue an MSE major.
Highlight: “Becoming a National Merit Finalist was exciting because I got to see the result of my academic efforts,” Skendzel says. He also points to this past cross country season – in which the St. Francis boys team won its first-ever Division 3 state championship title, by a substantial 62-point margin – as a fond memory. Perhaps most of all, though, Skendzel says he’ll miss the simple pleasures of high school, like eating lunch with his friends each day.

Taqwa Totakhail, TC West
Profile: Totakhail and her family fled Kabul, Afghanistan on August 14, 2021, the day before the Taliban returned to power. Her family’s path led to Traverse City, where Totakhail enrolled as a 10th grader at West Senior High. Though she spoke no English at the time, she proved a quick study, and has become one of West’s standout students. Last year, she won the National Writers Series (NWS) scholarship for nonfiction writing, for her essay “Dreams of Home,” and she recently earned Student of the Year honors from the Career-Tech Center’s health and science program.
Plans: Totakhail’s dream is to become a doctor of internal medicine and neurosurgery, and to take those skills abroad to places like Africa or Afghanistan. In the fall, she’ll attend Northwestern Michigan College, though she hopes to transfer to the University of Michigan or Harvard University in the future.
Highlight: Because the Taliban has banned girls from going to school, Totakhail sees it as her responsibility to cherish the educational opportunities she has in America. She cites the privilege of simply being able to go to school as the highlight of her years in Traverse City, and is particularly grateful for her CTC coursework for “showing me what my career as a doctor will be like.”