High schools plan creative graduations
Saugerties will hold a drivein event, while Onteora will have a car caravan that travels throughout the district.
Saugerties High School will hold a drive-in graduation ceremony on Friday, June 26, followed by a vehicle parade through the village.
The ceremony will be held on the fields at the school, with seniors their family members staying in their vehicles.
Principal Thomas Averill said at a Saugerties Board of Education meeting Tuesday that vehicles will have ribbons attached to them at Cantine Field, across Washington Avenue from the school, and they then will line up, drive to the school’s senior parking lot and be “extended out across the soccer field.”
The event will be shown on a 20-by-30-foot video screen that will be on the wall outside the school auditorium. There also will be a live feed available online.
Schools across New York state have been closed since late March because of the COVID-19 pandemic, but Gov. Andrew Cuomo last week announced that traditional graduation ceremonies can be held, provided they are limited to 150 people and social distancing is practiced. Averill said Saugerties High School, which has 181 seniors, would have to hold multiple ceremonies to comply, and attendance
by relatives would have to be limited.
“If we [did] decide to do the 150, we’d have to divide that up into five different groups,” the principal said.
He said the high school’s annual graduation ceremony typically is attended by 3,500
to 4,000 people.
Averill said that even with the drive-in format, the traditional speeches still will be given from a stage.
“We’re going to have a valedictorian, salutatorian and our class president speak, as well as a board member if they want to speak, myself [and Superintendent Kirk] Reinhardt,” the principal said.
Averill wrote in a letter to
the Class of 2020 that the ceremony will have three components.
“Part 1 will be similar to a traditional ceremony, with the exception that seniors will remain in their cars with their family members,” he wrote. “There will be a live ceremony, complete with a video tribute, speeches, diplomas, and the traditional transfer of the tassel.”
The second portion will
be a parade, with the graduates and their families driving through the village, and the third “will be a virtual graduation video that will be made available to all graduates shortly after the ceremony.”
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