Administrators: Planning school graduations a stressful balancing act
FAIRFIELD — Trying to plan a graduation ceremony during the coronavirus pandemic was literally trying to hit a moving target, according to Fairfield Ludlowe High School Headmaster Greg Hatzis.
“The state was considering lots of different options,” Hatzis said. “Obviously, they were being pressured by lots of different forces — parents, schools, the health departments and politicians.”
Hatzis said he, Fairfield Warde High School Headmaster Paul Cavanna and other school officials would start making plans under one set of guidelines, only for them to be changed. He said they wanted to give students the best- case scenario regardless of those guidelines.
“Every time the situation changed, in terms of what we may have been allowed to do, we felt compelled to reevaluate our plan to try to improve the possibility of getting as close to a real graduation ceremony as we could,” Hatzis said.
Now, weeks after successfully holding graduations June 16 and 17 at Jennings Beach, the two headmasters had some leisure to talk about what they did and how they did it.
The graduations took months of meetings between stakeholders, school and town officials and the Board of Education, they said.
Cavanna said the planning and execution was a collaborative effort: the two high schools worked together with parents, seniors and the different elements within the town.
“It was really a monumental task,” Cavanna said. “It came to be such a nice ceremony because of everyone pulling together.”
Hatzis said both headmasters had online meetings with students to find out what parts of the ceremony were the most important to them. He said they also had very active parent committees.
“It was a matter of getting everybody on the same page and helping them understand some of the restrictions that we were facing,” Hatzis said. “But they were obviously talking to their own children, so they had inside information from their kids and their friends.”
Cavanna said being together with their class and having their name called and walking across the stage to get their diploma were of key importance to graduating seniors.
Up until two weeks before graduation, Hatzis said, state guidelines only allowed for one or the other. If they were to let everyone be together and walk across the stage, he said they would have had to call one senior at a time.
“That would have taken four hours,” Hatzis said. “Or, we could have had kids walking across the stage, but in very small groups or as they drove by ( in cars). We were living in a world where we could not do both of those things.”
Then, Hatzis said, guidelines changed, allowing them to do the ceremonies that came to be. He said they had the full resources of both schools working together.
“That was kind of a cool thing, because when you’re in a two high school town, you always have a friendly sports rivalry and all those things,” Cavanna said. Instead, the planners were able to take the best aspects of each school’s plan and put it together in a spirit of “Now that we’re allowed to do it, lets come together as a town and make this happen for our kids.”
Cavanna said the end result was great for both schools. He said the two headmasters continue to get correspondence from families and from students who enjoyed it.
“With everything that was taken away from these seniors, we were able to give them back something that they’ll have a memory of forever,” he said.
Through the ordeal, Cavanna, who started at Warde a year ago, said he learned how important it was for the community to come together to make monumental tasks achievable.
Hatzis said they had never needed to work with some departments to plan an event before — including the Parks and Recreation Department, fire department and First Selectwoman Brenda Kupchick’s office.
“This coordination of all the town bodies was a great symbol of how graduation is a meaningful moment not just for the kids, but for the town,” Hatzis said. “The town invests a lot in these kids’ education. The kids spend 13, 14 years in some cases, in the system. This is a celebration of all of that.”
Kupchick said she was happy to work with the headmasters and emergency management teams to plan such a successful event.
Parks and Rec Director Anthony Calabrese said he was “glad the graduations were viewed as a success. When the graduation committees came to us with their initial plans, the town was excited to help out in any way that we could. My department was an obvious partner in the planning of the graduations due to our experience with running large scale events, specifically drive- in movies.”
Calabrese said knowing there was space at Jennings
Beach to host the events meant he brought in the beach parking staff. Everybody, he said, worked hard to give the students and parents an event to remember.
“To pull these two events off took a lot of team work and planning. We spent hours upon hours going over the layout, traffic patterns, staging, lighting, literally everything down to the last little details,” Calabrese said. “It would not have been possible to pull this off without the help of the police department, fire department, public works department, health department, board of education, and our First Selectwoman’s office! I’m sure I’m leaving someone out, but it really was a team effort!”
In the future, Hatzis said, they will look for ways to use the connections they built during the entire graduation planning process.
“We aren’t event planners,” Cavanna said. “That isn’t what we went to school to do or were trained to be, but it was really fun to do the planning of this and make something special.”