Graduation planning

Brian Wilson

Brian’s daughter, Elizabeth, called dibs for writing his column this week after learning about plans to not have monitors or screens at this year’s graduation ceremony at Medford Area Senior High School. Brian will be back next week.

When I was 17 and my baby brother was 12, I graduated high school. This was in 2018 when graduation was still held in the Simek Center. After the ceremony, my brother came and gave me a big hug.

My family, sitting way in the back of the over-crowded room was able to see me walking across the stage, shaking superintendent Pat Sullivan’s, school board president Dave Fleegel’s, and principal Jill Lybert’s hands as I accepted the diploma. They could see it clearly thanks to the giant screen behind the stage where the events on the stage were being projected.

As my family and teachers know, I suffered hard from senior slide and got to the point of being in danger of not graduating.

The moment of me getting my diploma was indicative of the way I had pulled myself back up in the last few weeks of my senior year, and was the result of years of nightly arguing about homework.

It was a big moment and I am still proud of it. After the tackle from my (at the time shorter than me) brother, he informed me that he was looking forward to his graduation. Seeing me walk across that stage made him have an aspiration, a goal.

He would not have had that goal in mind had he not been able to see me. If I had been just another blob of red in a crowd of other blobs of people dressed in red robes.

Graduation ceremonies are inherently inspirational events. You sit and see each graduate’s face as they walk nervously to their seats, and then again as they walk up the stairs and across the stage to receive their diplomas.

You get to see the relief on some students’ faces as they realize that they are done, or the pure joy and accomplishment on their faces. You lose this without cameras or screens forcing families to struggle to see their loved ones achieve those goals.

This year, the school is looking to do away with having the screens and the cameras at graduation - which is now outdoors on Raider Field, a place that holds more people and has them sit further away from the stage, making it even harder to see.

I understand that there is a signifiant cost to getting the screens and there have been concerns about the potential damage to the track and turf field from contracted crews delivering and removing them. I am just sad that I may not be able to see my brother’s face when he gets his diploma.

One of the parts of my brother’s graduation that I was most looking forward to was to see his face. My brother has an expressive face that he sometimes tried to hide.

I know that he won’t be able to hide the gigantic smile on his face. He has worked hard his entire academic career. He has had the typical struggles with teachers and had to work harder than some to learn how to learn.

His graduation will mark the end of a chapter in the lives of my family members. We are all adults and we will all be high school graduates. And I, for one, would like to see my brother’s face as he receives his diploma.

I would hope Medford schools can figure out a way to have some sort of displays to help people see the graduation ceremony or perhaps it could be live-streamed so that people could log into it from their cellphones and other devices as an alternative to the costly giant monitors they used in the past. — Elizabeth Wilson

Brian Wilson is News Editor at The Star News.