At the March 16 meeting of the Windsor Unified School District (WUSD) Board of Trustees, public comment revealed the Windsor High School senior class has been giving a lot of thought as to how their year is going end.
“We received 34 public comments from high school students,” said board president Stephanie Ahmad.
Ahmad took time to summarize the majority of the sentiments in the emails received, and student board member Ava Hamelburg read three letters in their entirety, but all the messages were the same — seniors want a proper graduation.
The letters covered similar ground: seniors want an in-person versus drive-thru graduation ceremony and they are willing to implement and all safety protocols in order to make that happen.
Ideas offered up included using the football field or even Keiser Park instead of the quad for the ceremony in order to have additional social-distancing space, splitting the graduates up into groups to have more, smaller ceremonies (several suggested each core have its own ceremony).
Several also expressed disappointment that despite a student and family survey which indicated a strong preference for an in-person graduation, students felt they weren’t being heard and the board was planning to go forward with a drive-thru ceremony.
There were also concerns that parents and family members would not be able to attend the ceremony. “Why would you plan a graduation without parents,” asked one letter writer.
Some of this may be out of the hands of the board. While there are some new, slightly relaxed guidance for “Outdoor Live Events with Assigned Seats and Controlled Mixing” coming into effect on April 1, depending on what tier the county is in at the time of graduation it could still impact any plans.
The new guidelines state that if the county is in the purple tier, events must have fewer than 100 people, and all must be regional visitors (from within a 120-mile radius), with advanced reservations and no concessions or concourse sales.
In the red tier, capacity can be at no more than 20%, with a weekly worker testing program, feature in-state visitors only, with advanced reservations required and in seat concessions.
In the orange tier, things remain similar to the red tier, but occupancy bumps up to 33%. Similarly, the major shift in the yellow tier is a bump up of occupancy to 67%. All forbid out-of-state attendees and concourse concessions.
When WUSD superintendent Jeremy Decker gave his superintendent’s report, he had a suggestion regarding the concerns and plans for graduation.
“With regards to graduation, it might behoove us to make this an item to discuss more robustly (at our meeting) next month,” he said. “I know there is general support to figure out how to do graduation in person, and I know (the high school has) been hard at work to pull off, so I think next month we make this an item and go through what we can.”
“Since it’s a month before we meet again, I want to thank Ava and all the students who wrote in,” said trustee Bill Adams. “Clearly, there is a growing consensus leaning towards in person graduation. So, I want to ask the high school to please start active and vigorous planning, so if there is a decision to be made we can do it on a specific plan. I urge you to work on that … if you can present us with a well-developed plan, that will get us farther than waiting to hear if we can do it and then trying to make a plan.”
