Live Oak Student of the Year Deanna Luneau overcomes tragic circumstances to earn diploma in three years

WATSON -- Deanna Luneau felt the nerves as soon as she woke up Saturday morning.

A little after 2:30 p.m. that afternoon, Luneau would deliver her senior address to the Live Oak High School class of 2017 as part of the commencement ceremony.

She spent most of the morning going over her one-page speech, reciting the words to herself and aloud in her bedroom. Her mother, Amanda Luneau, overheard her oldest child going over the speech, but she chose to walk away, wanting instead to hear the finished product.

Deanna paced around the bottom level of Southeastern’s University Center as groups of family and friends piled into the arena, filling the stands with more and more ears that would soon be listening to her speech.

She’d stop every few minutes to chat with teachers and fellow graduates, but she spent a good chunk of time to herself, going over the speech in her head.

“Public speaking is not my strong suit,” a nervous Deanna said minutes before walking to the stage.

But, like nearly everything else Deanna has done in her life, she passed with flying colors.

Deanna went through her two-minute speech without a hiccup, never losing track of the message she hoped to get across. When she finished, the audience erupted in applause for the 17-year-old Live Oak Student of the Year.

Minutes later, Deanna and the 299 other seniors of the Live Oak High School class of 2017 received their hard-earned diplomas, wrapping up a monumental chapter in the books of their lives.

For Deanna, this chapter was shorter than for others, but it was full of twists and turns, with uplifting and heartbreaking moments alike.

Deanna graduated high school in three years, combining her sophomore and juniors years into one during the 2015-16 school year.

To most people, that may seem quite the leap. But to anyone who knows Deanna, whose intelligence is perhaps matched only by her self motivation, it wasn’t.

“She’s one of the most motivated kids I’ve ever taught,” said Rosalind Dalberg, who was Deanna’s physics and chemistry teacher as well as her instructor for the robotics team. “She always sees the bigger picture.”

Deanna breezed through her curriculum at Live Oak — which included challenging classes such as AP English, AP Chemistry, Physics 1 and 2, AP Calculus advanced math — on the way to an accumulative 4.1837 GPA.

Starting in eighth grade, Deanna took the ACT five times and the new SAT twice, earning respective scores of 31 and 1380, placing her in the 97th and 93rd percentile nationally for all students who took those tests.

When she wasn’t studying, she didn’t really care to watch television — unless of course it was the Netflix show “Bill Nye Saves the World,” hosted by her “favorite human being ever” Bill Nye the Science Guy.

Instead, Deanna used whatever spare time she had to learn something new.

Before starting seventh grade, Deanna said she wanted to learn about psychology, so she borrowed old college textbooks from a friend’s mom and spent her summer vacation reading about the human mind and its functions.

Last summer, she became fascinated with solar power and spent her three-month break learning about the benefits of solar cars.

But her fascinations never superseded her school work, her mother said.

“I’ve never had to say, ‘Do your homework,’” Amanda said. “I knew it was done before she got home.”

For Deanna, devoting all her time and energy to school was her way of bettering herself, but it was also an escape from a home life that had grown tragic following years of happiness.

After being an only child for the first 10 years of her life, Deanna and her parents added to their family when Analena Marie Luneau was born July 8, 2010. Deanna, who always wanted a sibling, was allowed to name her new beloved sister.

But tragedy followed the family’s joyous day six months later when Amanda’s mother and Deanna’s grandmother passed away. There would be another funeral nine days later for Deanna’s grandfather, followed by 11 more for family members and close friends the rest of the year.

The deadly toll on their family had an affect at home, where Deanna’s father Brad slowly lost control of his personal life.

He started to drink heavily and distance himself from his wife and daughters, becoming a verbally — and at times physically — abusive man who no longer resembled the fun-loving dad Deanna knew.

With her parents’ once rock-solid marriage falling apart, Deanna took it upon herself to care for her sister, who was still a toddler with no comprehension of her family’s situation.

Deanna did everything for Analena: She cooked her meals, made her bottles, changed her diapers and even held her as she cried in the middle of the night.

“My sister was my life,” Deanna recalled. “I didn’t have much of a choice other than growing up at that point.”

Not only was Deanna caring for her younger sister, she was forced at times to play grown-up to her mother, who was torn between remembering the man she loved and seeing the man he had become.

“Those two right there,” Amanda said, nodding to her daughters a few feet away enjoying a game of Scrabble, “are my life, especially now. Having your kids makes a difference.

“As a parent, I know that time wasn’t my shining moment. But I knew always Deanna had my back.”

Amanda and Brad separated in December of 2014 once it became unsafe for them to be in the same house, but Deanna always worried about her father, whose heavy drinking eventually led to alcoholic liver cirrhosis.

He spent the last month of his life in the hospital before passing away at the age of 41. Despite all that had happened, Deanna was constantly in and out of the hospital, slowly mending the rocky relationship with her father.

There weren’t all happy moments. Deanna can clearly remember one frightening day when her father had seizure after seizure, starting at 6 a.m. and lasting late into the night, separated only by brief moments of peace.

“It was hours of him just having seizures,” Deanna said. “It was traumatizing.”

When her father was conscious, Deanna said he resembled “his old self.” They’d play guitar and sing together, and they would talk the way they did when she was younger, when he was “my best friend.”

Deanna wasn’t with her father when he passed July 19, 2016. But in her student of the year essay, which she said she cried her way through, she wrote that “he died knowing I loved him.”

For Deanna, her father was part of the reason she wanted to graduate early. She said she and her mother “always kind of knew it wasn’t going to end well for him,” so by combining her sophomore and junior years, she hoped to graduate in time for him to see.

Brad wasn’t there to watch his oldest daughter graduate last Saturday, but there were almost 25 people who were. Deanna’s mother had a seat directly behind the graduates on the bottom row of the stands in the SLU University Center while other family members and several friends sat a few rows up.

Amanda held up her camera as Deanna delivered her senior address to the audience, proudly smiling while holding back tears. The camera and the tears were out again when Live Oak principal Beth Jones handed Deanna her diploma.

Deanna and her mother shared a long, tight embrace after the commencement ceremony, stopping only when 6-year-old Analena ran into her older sister’s arms. After the hugs, Deanna and everyone who came to watch her graduate took a big group picture, forever capturing the emotional moment.

With high school officially behind her, Deanna’s eyes are on the future.

She’ll soon travel nearly 1,500 miles up north to Troy, New York, where she’ll take part in an accelerated degree program at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. If all goes according to plan, she’ll have her Ph.D in seven years.

She plans to major in chemistry and study synthetic photosynthesis, hoping that she can one day help create water purification systems for less-developed areas using solar power instead of natural resources like oil and coal.

Whenever her new friends ask her about her life, Deanna won’t be afraid to share all she’s been through. She’s never been shy about that, because it all made her who she is.

“My friends ask me all the time how I’m so comfortable with everything, and I tell them it’s because it made me who I am,” Deanna said. “I can’t change that, and I don’t want to change it. I am who I am, and someone will need that.”