Granton outdoor graduation ceremony planned for July 25
Fifteen graduates from the Granton School District will be getting their diplomas and official closure to their high school education with a graduation ceremony on July 25. The ceremony will begin at 11 a.m. at in the baseball diamond at the Granton Community Park.
The ceremony for the students comes two months after their original graduation date and will be different from the typical ceremony to make sure the district is meeting guidelines from the Clark County Health Department. To keep the number of attendees low, high school principal Amanda Kraus said the gathering will be limited to the students’ immediate families, a few other guests invited by each student, and teachers who had reserved spots for the event.
“There will be individual families with their group of chairs in pods in the outfield,” she said. “Each graduate will get a vehicle they can fill with guests that will be put in the park campground behind the ballfield. Teachers will have to RSVP and they’re going to be placed six feet apart outside the field by the playground in the park.”
The graduates themselves will be seated six feet apart in the infield, with the stage set up over home plate. The graduates will be bused into the ceremony from the high school, while families of the graduates will have to enter the field as a group.
“We’re having it in the community baseball field,” she said. “They will walk in as a family. The graduates will be placed on a bus one per seat and bused over when it begins. The graduates will be six feet apart in the infield, as socially distanced as possible.”
Anyone else who wishes to view the graduation will have the option of watching the event online. Kraus said graduation ceremonies have been taped and uploaded to the school district’s website for several years, and this year’s ceremony will likewise be uploaded to the school website in addition to the senior class video, which will not be shown at the ceremony as usual.
“This year, it will be just them at graduation,” she said. “It will all be on the Granton website, graduation will be viewed by everyone else that way.”
As for the ceremony itself, graduates will enter the field as “Pomp and Circumstance” plays over the park’s loudspeakers. Speeches will be given by valedictorian Kylie Ganther and salutatorian Alejandro Mendoza, with the podium sanitized between speeches. There will also be a presentation of scholarships, but graduates will receive their scholarships collectively at the end of the ceremony instead of coming up onto the stage to receive them. Diplomas will also be handed out in a sociallydistanced fashion; graduates will pick them up on a side table that will be wiped down between each graduate, and proceed off the stage where they will have their picture taken. At the end of the event, families and graduates will be dismissed as family units.
“We’re trying to give them kind of a normal, but kind of an intimate ceremony,” said Kraus. “We’re trying to limit the numbers as much as possible.”
Valedictorian Kylie Ganther
Salutatorian Alejandro Mendoza
