Graduation

I didn't catch a whole lot of the news tonight but I did catch something that annoyed me to no end.  It has to do with upcoming graduations and rules that are being put in place.  Many schools are preparing to keep things in check and keep them moving along.  And there are two issues that I have a real problem with.



Let's start with the origin of the problem, excessive celebration by parents during the ceremony.  I understand that people are excited that their child is moving on to the next stage of life but they tend to go overboard.  Quite often the screaming, hooting, and hollering is more like you are at a sweet 16 party, not a ceremony.  And this goes beyond graduation ceremonies.  I'm not sure when the United States adults stopped being adults.  I'm not stating that you have to be stuffy and show up in a 3 piece suit, but give me a break!  And what makes it worse is that most of these parents gripe and complain while the other parents are doing it because they are forced to wait.


And this leads to the second issue that I have.  The school officials aren't getting paid extra for being there to do this and many of the people don't want to spend all day sitting there waiting for the end.  So school officials are trying to do something about it.  They are putting rules into place stating that if you are too loud and cause too much of a commotion you will be asked to leave or, in some extreme cases, arrested for disturbing the peace.  I get that there needs to be some rules, especially when you are talking about some of the larger districts where there are well over 1000 kids in the class.  But arresting someone for it?  They even talked in the story about one kid having his diploma withheld because of his mother's actions.  That is going overboard!


What needs to happen is that parents need to grow up to start with.  But beyond that the school districts need to come up with a better way to enforce things.  Start out with sending home some guidelines for people to follow.  You can enforce the guidelines with police officers but leave the decision of arrest to the professionals.  I think the threat of being arrested for resisting an officer may be enough to control things.  But I can't think of any instance where you should be able to withhold a diploma because of the actions of others!