The Jacksonville High School Senior Class will be crossing the stage at the JHS Bowl a couple of Fridays from now, and administrators are glad a change was made with regard to snow days.
JHS Graduation is on Friday, May 19th this year, and Superintendent Steve Ptacek talked about the early time frame for graduation working out well this year during the District 117 School Board meeting last week.
Over the course of this school year, the mild winter meant that the district did not lose one single day of school for a weather-related closure and Ptacek says it’s years like these why it just makes sense that the board moved graduation up to earlier in May.
“I moved a couple of years ago that we move graduation to the Friday before Memorial Day, and the reason why is we had one of the rare years early on where we didn’t have any snow days, and we were asking our staff to come back on a Friday after they had already started their summer break, and students to come back after they had started summer break and I just didn’t feel that was right.
So we moved it to the Friday before Memorial Day, and yes that does mean some years we are letting the seniors out a week and a half before everyone else. But that’s the end of the year and a lot of districts do that.
This year it definitely paid off because the next Monday is the last student day for everyone so if we would have kept it like the Friday after Memorial Day as it used to be, it would be two weeks after everyone leaves on break to have to come back for graduation, so this definitely paid off.”
Graduation kicks off at 7:00 pm at the JHS Bowl on Friday, May 19th. Seniors are asked to begin gathering across the street at Grace United Methodist Church at 6:30.
A Baccalaureate will be held at the Rammelkamp Chapel at Illinois College on Thursday, May 18th, and the JHS senior prom is this Saturday at Hamilton’s 110 North East in downtown Jacksonville from 8 to 11 pm.