Drive-thru or drive-in for grads?
Humboldt County's schools, parents look to innovate around social distance
All the other staples of senior year’s spring semester were out the window, and now the unhappy prospect of not seeing one of her three sons take part in a high school graduation ceremony kept Gina Paine up at night.
Then the Garberville mother had an idea. With the community’s support, it just might work.
“We’re going to have a senior ‘cruise’ through town, so the kids can be isolated with their families in the car,” Paine said. “People on the sidewalks could throw confetti, and businesses could decorate storefronts.”
The idea is to give students of South Fork High School a graduation ceremony that befits the milestone’s festivities. Anything besides a sterile gathering on Zoom, the teleconferencing software, will do, Paine said.
“After the ceremony, the idea is to go to the community park and have something very similar to a drive-in movie,” said Paine, the president of the school’s booster club. Families would hang out in their cars while the proceedings — including the valedictorians’ speeches —
would be broadcast through car speakers via the community radio station KMUD.
For Paine, graduating high school is the carrot at the end of a long road. She’s grateful to community members who have thrown their support behind her idea.
“The true spirit of Southern Humboldt is to jump in and help,” she said.
Other communities are attempting similar feats. At Eureka Senior High, principal Jennifer Johnson asked her senior class officers how they want to hold graduations.
The students consulted their classmates and decided that they needed to buy themselves some time. Graduation will now be held July 31, and the class will use the time in between to explore different options for the ceremony’s format.
One possibility: Spreading the grads out across the field at Albee Stadium, with either a limited audience or no one at all in the bleachers. Another idea: A virtual ceremony broadcast over the internet, where students pick up diplomas remotely in their families’ cars — similar to South Fork’s concept.
Johnson says it breaks her heart every time she takes an event off the senior calendar, but she said the students have been “incredibly mature” about their circumstances.
“I talked to our valedictorians about what they want to do for the theme of their speeches,” Johnson said. “They came up with a theme around ‘interruptions.’ This poor class, they had the power interruptions at the beginning of this year. (Graduation) is the one thing of all the things they want to work out.”
The nearby Alder Grove Charter School will also employ a limited drive-thru format. Director Tim Warner said he’s hopeful the graduating class’ smaller size will enable the format to work.
“Our school is unique; we have a lot of students who we were at the last step before they dropped out,” Warner said. “Some of them would be the first to graduate in their families. We want some kind of celebration for the students who worked so hard to get here.”
At Ferndale High, graduates will drive up to collect their diplomas, but the school is holding out hope for a socially-distanced ceremony at the football field later this summer if restrictions lift by then, principal (and district superintendent) Beth Anderson said. The first ceremony will similarly be broadcast on the web.
“It’s the least we can do,” Anderson said. “We aren’t able to do prom and spring sports or just have the final months of them being in the hallways with each other. But safety, as always, remains the most important thing. We want our students and their families to stay healthy.”