Grad parties: Joy, caution

The next big event after Easter and before Memorial Day for many families is graduation season. My older son is graduating from high school next month and like many parents, it feels as much of a milestone for me as it is for him.

He attends Cumberland Academy of Georgia, a small private school designed to help students with learning challenges. There are only a handful of graduating seniors and I see this as a good thing. There is no lottery for ceremony tickets or edicts from school administration prohibiting proud relatives from exuberant celebrating. While I don’t plan on bringing a bullhorn or unused thunder sticks from the last Hawks game I attended, I will be cheering him on for persevering through a 13-yearlong uphill battle.

School wasn’t a breeze for him. He was diagnosed with development delay at age 3 and then showed signs of Asperger’s syndrome by the time he was in kindergarten. It’s a milder form of autism, and he’s never been formally diagnosed. But that’s a story for another time.

Right now we want him to know how proud we are that he stuck with his classes. Through thousands of hours of tutoring sessions and visits with therapists and seemingly endless piles of Individualized Education Plan paperwork, he kept a positive outlook and did his best work almost every day. Although he’s only been at Cumberland two years, he found his groove. He will graduate with all A’s and B’s and he earned every grade.

That’s why we’re going all out for his graduation party. We thought about having a bunch of friends over to the house and keeping it casual, but with the unpredictability of social media I’m exercising an abundance of caution.

He’s a good kid who respects authority and keeps out of trouble. But that doesn’t mean trouble can’t find him. He’s had several social media “friends” invite him to hang out once they realize he has his own car and might be easy to persuade into doing things he shouldn’t. But his father and I have drilled into his head that anyone he hasn’t met in person can’t be called a real friend. He’s learned to be a lot more selective in that area.

But that still doesn’t keep other kids from passing along invitations to parties. This time of year there are plenty of headlines about mayhem and sometimes terrible accidents befalling unsuspecting party goers. It only takes one knucklehead to turn a good time into a catastrophe. Quite often it’s someone who wasn’t even on the guest list.

We’re having the graduation party at a hotel and have hired off-duty police to keep the peace. We won’t be disturbing neighbors with noise, cars parked all over the place and kids littering their lawns. The parents of my son’s friends don’t have to worry about gate-crashers, because our security has arrest authority.

In the end, I’m hoping all this wasn’t necessary, but I don’t want my son’s new beginning to come to a tragic end for him or any of his friends. Let’s hope this graduation season sees zero party mishaps for everyone in the Class of 2017.