Harlingen High School graduating two valedictorians

Harlingen High School valedictorians Victoria Martinez and Silas White. (Courtesy: Harlingen CISD)

HARLINGEN — Each year every high school has a valedictorian in its graduating class and then a salutatorian running a close second, right?

Well, not necessarily.

Meet Silas White and Victoria Martinez, who will graduate from Harlingen High School this year with identical GPAs.

In other words, they’re both valedictorians, with impressive GPAs of 4.85.

“It’s awesome,” said Silas, 18, who plans to study finance at the University of Texas in Dallas.

“I’m also very excited,” said his friend Victoria, 18.

Crystal Cantu, head counselor at HHS, said district policy states if there are two ties for valedictorian then there is no salutatorian.

Silas and Victoria have known each other since middle school and have had classes together. They were not competing with each other or in a dead heat to earn the top spot in their class. They just did what they do best. Study, listen, take notes, ask questions, take notes, study, watch YouTube videos …

Many students these days report using YouTube videos of students and teachers talking about a subject with which they are having difficulty.

For Victoria, it was macroeconomics.

“It was new concepts I’d never heard of,” she said. “I used lots of review games. It was a website our teacher informed us of, and it had practice questions.”

Silas struggled with physics.

“You have to have formulas memorized,” he said. “That’s a problem for me, the memorization. I guess that’s the whole hour thing, just rereading it and going over it again and again. And try to get it set.”

The “whole hour thing” refers to his spending only about an hour each night studying.

How is that possible?

“I think my memory honestly is pretty good,” he said. “That’s the whole point of writing the notes, so I can just look over it and remember everything that happened, and I finish most of my work during class anyway. So, there’s not much to study.”

Math was his favorite subject.

“For me it would be like math and algebra,” he said. “It was very straightforward. If you have a problem, you just answer it.”

Same for Victoria.

“Once you solve it you can keep going,” she said.

Math as a passion and a strength is a good fit for Victoria, who plans to study aerospace engineering at Texas A&M University.

She thanks her parents and her brother for supporting her endeavors through the years and her reaching the top spot in her class.

For Silas, it’s his girlfriend of two years, Daniela Torrez, herself in the top 10% of the HHS graduating class of 2025.

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