Out My Window – Part 4

 

Sunshine

Looking out my window this morning, it’s a beautiful day.  We had a frost warning last night, it one of those May’s that I hated as a track coach.  But hopefully last night was the last cold night, it’s going up to the sixties today and the seventies later this week.  Maybe April is done now that we’ve reached the middle of May.

Funny that somehow “stay at home” isn’t stay “indoors”.  It’s not the outside air that’s a risk, nor the cool green grass.  It’s people that represent a danger, and it’s me that represents a risk to them.  That concept is so much harder than just “hide inside”.

Empty Schools

May is always a busy month in public education.  Kids are finishing up school, teams are finishing up the season, and seniors are graduating.  But it’s a very different world this year.  Kids are still finishing up school, but it’s a cold distant school, reached through a screen and a keyboard.  No one is getting hugs on the last day, pitching notebooks into the school trash on the way out the door.  It’s just a final sign-off, a last Zoom or video.  

I’m not coaching, but if I were this would be an awful, empty year.  Staying close to home I don’t notice it that much, but when I got out, drove by the high school track, I felt the ache of loss that those kids are feeling.  It’s gone, something that can never be made up.  As a coach I always stopped the kids from talking about “next year”.  I’d tell them:  “…There’s no guarantee of next year, no contract with the future that your body and your plans will come true.  Don’t depend on that; go for your goals now”.  I never thought about this scenario though, not for a whole team, a whole class, a whole world.

Here in Pataskala, the adults are doing their best to make graduation something special. There is no way to replace the camaraderie, sitting by your friends through the ritual of the ceremony. This year, they can’t sit by their friends. Some schools fixed on “crossing the stage”, the line used by administrators to push marginal seniors to graduate. But crossing an empty stage, in an empty room, and picking up a loan diploma seems to only emphasize all that’s missing.

New Rituals

But here, the school leaders have taken a different approach.  Graduation day is Saturday May 23^rd.  Thirty school buses will head out, each with a driver, an administrator, and a parade of teachers’ cars behind it.  A bus will go to each of the three hundred senior’s homes and pull up.  The administrator will come out and award a diploma to the appropriately capped and gowned student.  Family, masked and distanced, will get the chance to watch.  Pictures will be taken beside the bus.  As one parent described it, “…we put a kindergartner on a bus in front of our house thirteen years ago, now the bus delivers our graduate back to us”.

The emphasis is on the graduate, not the empty room and stage.  There was some controversy when this was first announced, along with the final statement that there wouldn’t be a traditional graduation.  Some folks lashed out on social media, attacking the school leaders for “letting the kids down”.  But once that first wave of frustration washed through, most of the community got behind the plan.  

The Finish Line

The seniors picked up their caps and gowns at the high school; spaced carefully to keep from any unacceptable gathering.  The Cross Country coaches, good friends of mine, arranged for a special tribute.  A new finish line “arch” was specially ordered.  It’s large enough to drive through, and the seniors literally got to cruise through “the finish” of their high school career.

Twenty-two years from now, will the then-forty year old graduates look back with regrets at the ceremonies they missed?  Of course they will.  But will they also look back at a school and a community that did everything they could to make their “finish” special and unique?  I think so.  

Our COVID world is one full of “no’s”.  NO graduation, NO Fourth of July fireworks, NO swimming pools in the summer, NO concerts or ballgames or track meets.  In our world of “NO”, it’s good that some are making it better; making it special even if it’s very different.  Here in Pataskala, there is at least one “yes”.  The bus will pull up out front, and three hundred kids will graduate, one-by-one.  That’s a big “YES” for them.