Later this month, Jamesville-DeWitt High School seniors will fulfill the tradition of walking across the stage to pick up their diploma. But it won’t be done in a traditional manner.
Forced to change their plans due to the COVID-19 pandemic, J-D will not have its traditional commencement ceremony.
Instead, a virtual ceremony will be broadcast, featuring the same parts of the program including music, speeches, awards and diplomas, with the hope that it will be watched by families at home.
J-D school superintendent Dr. Peter Smith outlined the details of this ceremony at the June 1 meeting of the school district’s Board of Education
Smith said that, in order to follow safety guidelines set out by New York State and Onondaga County Health Department officials, many ideas were considered, with the district narrowing down to two options considered for graduation.
One option involved doing the virtual ceremony on roughly the same date as the canceled June 21 public event. The other involved waiting until later in the summer, when bigger crowds could gather under loosened social-distancing guidelines.
Ultimately, said Smith, the district thought that pushing the ceremony to July or August would be “irresponsible on our part”, given possible uncertainty around state guidelines, plus summer plans that graduates and their families may have, along with going off to college.
So the district decided to hire a production company that would put together a video including the same elements of a graduation ceremony.
The key part would be that each individual senior would be filmed receiving their diploma, with up to five family members able to view it in person.
Once that was done, the plan would be to air that program on June 21 at 1 p.m. on local television, the exact same time that the ceremony would have started at the Mulroy Civic Center in downtown Syracuse.
“It’s certainly not ideal, but we believe this is as good an opportunity as we can have to honor seniors in a same, meaningful way,” said Smith. “We’re just presenting it in a different manner.”
Details about the ceremony were scheduled to get sent out last week to the families of J-D seniors, and many of those students have consulted with school officials on these plans.
Will Guisbond, a J-D senior who has served as an ex-officio member of the School Board during 2019-20, said that he and his fellow students welcome the chance to receive their diplomas.
“This is a great opportunity for all of us to be individually recognized,” said Guisbond. “I’m looking forward to it.”
But that sentiment is not unanimous, though.
Another J-D senior, Cara Glazier, started a change.org petition asking for a larger in-person graduation ceremony later in the summer and, by the end of last week, the petition had nearly 1,000 signatures.
“Help the Jamesville-DeWitt Class of 2020 have the potential to graduate at a later date with their fellow classmates they have grown up with,” the petition said.
