Officials, students request lift on state graduation policies

Over 100 current and former Locust Valley School District students joined county and town officials at the Locust Valley High School Athletic Field at Centre Island Beach in Bayville on June 11 to ask Gov. Andrew Cuomo to lift his limitations on high school graduations.

Cuomo announced on June 7 that high schools could conduct outside graduation ceremonies of up to 150 people. That amount, Thursday’s speakers said, is too little.

Margaret Marchand, a trustee on the Locust Valley Board of Education, spoke first. Speaking as a parent and not a trustee, she said Cuomo’s ruling instigated the creation of New Yorkers for Live Graduations, a statewide Facebook page with over 3,000 followers, and said petitions to lift the graduation capacity has garnered over 6,700 signatures.

Marchand said that education is the single most equalizing tool available for all Americans, and graduation is the ultimate celebration of that equality.

“Graduation is the single most unifying event a society can hold,” Marchand said. “Graduation doesn’t see color, it doesn’t see race, creed, religion, economics, sexuality — it doesn’t see anything. What it sees is a person worked for a goal in an educational system and they earned something.”

Town of Oyster Bay Supervisor Joseph Saladino asked everyone to imagine what it would be like to hold a graduation ceremony on Locust Valley High School’s field, which he said would be more than capable of hosting a socially-distanced graduation ceremony for class of 2020. Those students are the future of the town and the state, he said, and the town has offered its facilities and resources such as chairs and roll-up bleachers to accommodate any needs the school district may have.

Saladino’s statements received raucous applause from the students behind him. “We’re here to help and we’re here to be your voice,” he said, “and we demand that New York state adjust the restriction and let us graduate together.”

As a parent of Locust Valley students, Town Councilwoman Michele Johnson said remote learning has presented a “tremendous” amount of stress on students, and they deserve to be rewarded for their efforts with a live graduation. She also said remote learning has done a great deal to flatten the coronavirus curve, making live graduations safer than would have been the case earlier this year.

Legislator Josh Lafazan, an Independent from Woodbury, also asked Cuomo to lift the cap on graduates. He said students complied immediately when they were told to shift to remote learning. High school seniors lost out on some of the most important social events of their lives, he said, and denying them a live graduation could be the last chance for them to all be together.

Marchand said district officials have developed ways to keep graduates socially distant during a graduation ceremony and asked why people could congregate at big box stores and not a celebration of student achievement.

If the town could open parks and facilities, Saladino added, live graduations can be held.

Following the press conference, Lafazan said the recentness of his 2012 high school graduation makes this cause an important one to him. It was an amazing experience to be able to celebrate with his friends and family, he said, something which the Class of 2020 deserves as well.

Locust Valley seniors Marissa Lewis and Chloe Keeney were among those behind the speakers, holding signs in support of a live graduation. Both said a larger ceremony would be very important to them.

“We grew up together, we want to do everything together,” Lewis said. “I think it’s not fair that everyone can go to TOBAY Beach and be so close to each other and we can’t have a socially-distanced graduation.”

“We’ve spent so many years going to school together and working so hard and we can’t even have a formal sendoff or closure,” Keeney said.

Since she has high school-aged children, Johnson said she knows how important graduation is to seniors. She said the door was slammed shut on their senior year by the pandemic and graduation could be the only time for the Class of 2020 to be reunited.

Marchand said she too has a personal connection to this year’s graduation.

“I’m a mother of twins who are graduating,” she said, “and to me, I think that graduation truly is a very symbolic moment in someone’s life where they realize what they’ve achieved and how hard they’ve worked to get there. I do think that it’s their right to freely assemble, so all those reasons put together are why it’s important to me.”