JOPLIN, Mo. — There were tearful remembrances for lost classmates and jokes about spending their senior year in a converted department store.
But most of all for Joplin High School's Class of 2012, a chorus of rousing cheers and joyous celebrations marked their completion of high school under circumstance none of them could have envisioned just one year ago.
Monday night's graduation, which featured commencement speeches by President Barack Obama and Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon, capped a senior year for the 428 members of the Class of 2012 marked by tragedy, turmoil and perseverance.
The president visited southwest Missouri the day before the anniversary of the country's deadliest single tornado in six decades. The May 22, 2011, twister killed 161 people, injured hundreds more and destroyed thousands of buildings, including Joplin High. Five other Joplin schools were also destroyed, with four more among the damaged structures.
The twister arrived hours after last year's high school graduation, forever defining the Joplin High Class of 2011 and their younger classmates as well. The tornado's victims included two Joplin High students, sophomore Lantz Hare and senior Will Norton, a school system secretary and several younger students.
"They had to grow up the night of the storm," Joplin High principal Kerry Sachetta said. "They saw things they never should have had to see."
The high school seniors who assembled Monday night at Missouri Southern State University's campus gym also encountered a label they sought both to embrace and avoid, a refrain overheard in whispers or uttered bluntly at soccer games, summer camps and national academic competitions: Here come the tornado kids from Joplin.
School officials vowed to return to class on time. They turned a vacant big-box retail store at the city's only mall into a temporary Joplin High for juniors and seniors, with freshmen and 10th-graders at another location across town. A middle school relocated to an industrial park warehouse.
"I'm proud to be a member of the Northpark Mall graduates of 2012," senior class president Chloe Hadley joked. "We have been through the unbelievable, and have become stronger and closer than ever before."
Despite the less than ideal location, Joplin students embraced their return to a school they saw as a refuge, a safe haven in a town otherwise gone awry, said Joplin High English teacher Brenda White.
"Those kids who lost something needed normalcy," she said. "And there was no real place to go. But school is a normal place."
The Joplin tornado helped tighten bonds, diminish cliques, elevate school spirit and strengthen community ties, students and teachers said. Disciplinary violations declined dramatically — with just two fights through the entire school year.
"Once we had been through (everything) this last year, people just weren't interested in a lot of the general high school nonsense," said graduating senior Derek Carter, who will attend the University of Alabama in the fall.