How can people be so cruel?
Wow, things sure are different in Pennsylvania. (They find it easy to be hard.) As a graduate, as a member of the band that played Pomp & Circumstance, as a mother, as a friend, and as a grandma, I have attended I don’t know how many graduations. In Oklahoma, Colorado, Texas, New Mexico, and California.
Not once, not ONE TIME, did the graduation ever start precisely on time. Never. My youngest son’s started almost 20 minutes late. To accommodate late-comers. But they all started somewhat late. I think 8 minutes was about average, and 20 minutes was probably excessive. (And at that, there were some people who missed it, I think. There were people still coming in up till they started the processional.)
Yeah, what’s the point of not letting them in? It’s not an audience with the Pope.
The interesting part for me, is that these ceremonies are so utterly pointless and forgettable. Pictures and snapped, never to be looked at, speeches are droned, never to be thought about. You get a piece of paper, to be stuck in a drawer and never given a second thought.
All a waste of time.
Most of the public high school graduations, and the college ones too, are held at my local Enormodome, which has a seating capacity of about 12,000. Theirs have to start and finish on time, because they will often schedule several on a Saturday - morning, early afternoon, late afternoon, and evening.
Not only do colleges usually have a December ceremony, they usually have a small one in August for summer graduates.
I’ve been part of organizing more graduations than I care to remember, and we’ve never even considered locking late comers out. That’s awful. Don’t delay the start, don’t let them in during the pledge, but otherwise, of course you seat them.
And it’s easy to dismiss HS graduation as no big deal when your parents graduated from college and everyone fully expect you to do the same. Its really different when the family doesn’t have that sort of expectation/past history. When you’re an illiterate Salvadoran refugee, it means a lot to see your kid walk across the stage, and dismissing what that is like just because your context was different is really insulting to those for whom this IS an accomplishment.
Also, frankly, I think treating graduation as a major milestone goes a long way toward helping a kid see themselves as an adult, not a perpetual child. IMHO there are a lot of college kids who would be better off if graduation had been treated as a coming of age, not as mwaningless bullshit.
I wonder how the Fire Marshall feels about the doors being locked?
I doubt they welded the doors shut or anything like that.
If you scroll through the pictures in the link Debillw3 posted, it looks like the venue is completely full. I imagine the school has the firm policy every year because there are more people than seats every year. I am totally sorry for the parents and families who didn’t get in but I can also see the problem. I wonder if they do as some schools do and issue tickets to control the size of the audience. If they do, then they ought to try to let everyone in as there would be enough seats. If not, not.
The doors would have been locked from the outside, not the inside.