By: Jacob Schneider
College of the Canyons has always hosted its graduation as one unified ceremony. However, this year the college is breaking tradition, splitting the ceremony into a morning and evening event for the whopping 2119 graduates.
“With deciding to go to two ceremonies it’s something that I think the faculty have pushed for for several years,” mentions Kelly Dapp, “But probably what impacted that decision the most was that back in 2019 when we had just one in person ceremony we had close to 900, actually I think it was close to 950 graduates that participated in that ceremony… So we wanted to kind of take a look at things and do things a little bit different this time.”
While for many students splitting the ceremony will result in a better graduation, the divided campus might end up damaging the experience of our student athletes. While Athletes are allowed to support each-other by attending both ceremonies, the proposed scheduling could make that a significant challenge.
Lisa Hooper brings up the difficulties of the two parted ceremony, ” I would imagine that with very few exceptions those athletes would like to graduate together. They’d like to celebrate together. So volleyball’s a pretty small squad so on any given year we probably have between five and ten sophomores. But when you think about some of the larger squads like football or maybe track and field, they could have more than 20, maybe even 30 athletes… The Way that this schedule is structured It’s my understanding that one will be held in the morning on Friday and the other will be held in the evening on Friday and so it just makes for a long day. If in fact there were like two consecutive evenings or maybe two consecutive mornings, it would be less challenging.”
