River View names first valedictorian

BRADSHAW — Shawn Cheeks, the first valedictorian at the new River View High School, received so many awards at an honors assembly this week that he couldn’t remember them all.

The resident of Caretta will now put his scholarship money to use at Marshall University, with the goal of becoming a meteorologist.

It’s a good career choice, he said, noting, “Weather’s always going to be around.”

River View is completing its first year with graduation ceremonies this evening at 8 p.m. in the spacious gymnasium. It will be a busy night in McDowell County, with Mount View holding its graduation at 7 p.m. this evening at the school.

Cheeks said being named valedictorian was “a huge honor. I just know it took a lot of hard work.”

One of his former teachers, River View instructor Phillip Dunford, said, “When he was in eighth grade, I knew good things were going to happen for Shawn.”

Cheeks will receive the Promise Scholarship from the state, and two major awards from Marshall itself, the Presidential Scholarship and the John Marshall Honor Scholarship.

Among his other awards were the AXA Achievement Scholarship, he said, “and that’s worth $10,000, and I also received the Dr. Dante Castrodale Scholarship, and that is $2,500 per year, renewable for four years.”

“It is a big help,” he said. “Promise doesn’t cover all of the tuition, but most of it. Marshall’s giving me a pretty good piece for room and board.”

He said, “The counselor, Ms. Van Dyke, did a great job alerting me to scholarships. Whenever she would receive a scholarship, she would print off copies for every (eligible) student, and she would come and find us at lunch. She was always walking around the lunchroom saying “Got this one for you and this one for you.’ She was always helpful with getting transcripts and all the materials they needed. The teachers were really good about letters of recommendation for scholarships.”

His parents, Michael and Crystal Cheeks, said, “The teachers have been very supportive, helping him out.”

The River View graduate-to-be was interested in computers “for as long as I can remember,” he said. “I was real little when I started playing around on the computer. (My parents) bought video games for me, and I’d just play around with those, and I just learned about them.”

Later, Kerri Anderson, teaching at the gifted center in Welch, “worked with us, with computers,” he said. “The rest of it was me, just working with them. That’s really how you have to learn computers, is to work with them.”

He said, “I took pretty much all the math classes that Big Creek offered, while I was there.” He said Big Creek also helped enroll him in online classes such as upper-level calculus through the “West Virginia virtual school.”

He has already completed an online Marshall class, he said.

The wireless “wi-fi” signal permeating the new River View High School “was really nice,” he said, “because you’re not necessarily limited to plugging into a wall to get Internet. You can walk down the hall with a laptop and still be surfing. It opened up a lot of possibilities.”

He quickly discovered that there is currently no college or university in West Virginia with a major in his chosen field, meteorology, but he didn’t give up.

“I found out through Corey Henderson (WVVA television meteorologist) that Marshall is developing a meteorology program. It’s currently a minor, but it is expected to be a major.”

His unofficial advisors told him that “since the field is so computer-heavy (and) technology-based, that a computer science degree would be helpful.

“You have people who work on computers for meteorologists who don’t know anything about the weather, and then the meteorologists have computer problems, but they don’t know how to fix it.”

That requires a “two-person team,” but Cheeks plans to become a two-in-one specialist. He said, “Currently, I am a computer science major with a minor in meteorology, but I’m planning on dual-majoring when it becomes a major.”

He put his computer knowledge to work at River View for the new sports program at the school — and true to his nature, with an eye to the future.

Late last fall, he said he thought to himself, “I’m going to be going to Marshall next year, and I won’t necessarily be able to keep up with River View athletics in Huntington.

“I had seen how some other schools had started online radio, so I started looking up how to broadcast radio online — and I saw it’d be just as easy to put video with it, so it’d be almost like an Internet TV broadcast.”

“I researched that and I said, ‘Hey, we can do this!’ ”

His attitude convinced assistant principal Inga Barker, he said, and he began to scavenge for parts.

“I pretty much assembled it from a bunch of different teachers, and got everything together and made it work,” he said.

During basketball season he would sit behind the scorer’s table, with a “lap desk” in front of him, tweaking the computer signal while he swung a tiny camera around to keep up with the action.

He said, “I said I was the executive producer and cameraman, but that’s just a title I gave myself.”

He recruited other students to do the voice-over commentary. “That’s one thing I really wanted, was to keep it student run,” he said. “One of the announcers, Brad Hardy, liked to call it RSN, Raiders Sports Network, modeled after Mountaineer Sports Network. That was, I guess, the unofficial name.”

Word eventually got around about the live webcasts.

“We had other people who would watch fairly regularly, online,” he said. “The players really like it, because it saves the game film on the website. They can go back and watch the shot, on ‘game film.’

“We were actually able to download the archive video feed, and burn it onto DVDs, and Coach (Don) Smith was able to use it for game film.”

He said a River View assistant football coach was surprised when Cheeks told him that he had figured out the computer-based rating system used by the state sanctioning body to determine playoff positions.

“You can just punch in a formula and know what’s going to happen,” Cheeks said. “I’d tell him, ‘Yeah, we’re going to be ranked 11th this week, or whatever.’ He’d look at it, a big spread sheet on Excel, so we’d know how it was going to turn out.”

The football staff then tapped him to keep team statistics for their final three games. He also put together a highlight video of selected big plays from the Raiders’ initial season and set it to music. It was reportedly a big hit at the end-of-the-season football banquet.

Just in case the weather-forecasting career doesn’t pan out, Cheeks appears to have developed an alternate career path.

— Contact Tom Bone at

tbone@bdtonline.com

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