I have been promising to do a few excerpts from my next book about schools and school life in the blog and so I decided to do the first of these tonight.

The story below is an absolute true remembrance about a graduation a long time ago when I was a teacher and coach at a small school in the Florida panhandle. The names used in the story have been changed except for mine and another teacher friend who was involved with the story.  I am going to include only a portion of the story in this blog but I hope readers will enjoy this memory about a graduation ceremony. Just be sure to understand you never know what you will see or hear at school events or activities.

A Graduation to Remember

I know some of you who have been reading these stories are asking yourself, “Did that really happen like he is telling it?”  To this I will say again, the stories shared in this book are absolutely true to the best of my ability to remember with very few, if any, embellishments and then only to more fully explain the event in understandable terms. For any and all of these, I guarantee I can produce witnesses that will stand up and testify like revival time in a southern Baptist church as to the authenticity of the stories.

With that, this one is one of the funnier and more shocking remembrances I have about any graduation ceremony in which I was a participant or witness. This happened when I was working as a teacher and coach at a very small K-12 school located in Calhoun county Florida that at the time of the event had about 360 students in the entire school.

If you do the math, you will see this means there was an average of about 27 students per class. However, as in most schools, the lower grades tended to have more students in them with the upper classes somewhat smaller. Most years, we would graduate between 20-25 students but we also had some years with as few as 17 graduates. Because of the small size, the entire faculty consisted of about 25 teachers for all grades K-12.

Graduation was held in the gym each year as the school did not have a stadium since it was too small to have a football team. On top of that, the gym was so small only one side of the gym had bleachers on it. During the graduation ceremony, it was the custom for the graduating seniors to sit in a single line of chairs lined up right down the middle of the gym floor facing the bleachers with all of the teachers seated behind them also sitting in a single row of chairs.

When it was time for the ceremony to begin, the teachers would all file out onto the floor and take their places standing in front of their chairs. Then one of the senior sponsors would play “Pomp and Circumstance” from a record or tape on a portable sound system set up for the evening as the school also had no music program or band other than a little chorus taught only in the elementary grades.

As the music would begin, the graduating seniors would enter the gym from a side door that led into the gym from the main building. They would have gathered there prior to entering the gym to put on their caps and gowns and make last minute adjustments to their shirts, ties, hairdos. As the seniors would enter the gym, cameras would flash and the oohs and aahs of proud moms, dads, grandparents and community members could be heard over the music as the soon to be graduates would proudly take their places in the neatly aligned chairs.

On this particular graduation night, the teachers had entered the gym, the music had begun to play and the seniors in all of their glory and anticipation of the evening’s events began to enter the gym. The parents, grandparents, other kin folks, students and visitors were all standing as the seniors entered the gym and assumed their places. When all of the seniors were standing in their appointed places, the music stopped and the senior who had been chosen to give the evenings invocation began to make their way to the podium.

All of sudden with the crowd still very quiet and waiting attentively for the prayer to begin, one of the senior boys, in a loud, clearly understood and with little emotion in his voice said, “Momma, Lucille’s out there and she pulled a knife on me.”  Suddenly, you could hear an audible gasp in the crowd though no one moved.

Now, I happened to be standing by my good friend and fellow teacher Greg Jones almost directly behind the young man who had made the announcement. I turned to Greg and said, “Did he just say what I think he said?’  Greg nodded in the affirmative and said, “Yep, I believe he did.” With that we both started to move down the line of teachers, headed towards the door through which the seniors had just entered.

To be continued in the book – when it is completed hope many will order one to read the rest of the story. However, I will reveal that no one was injured in the events that followed though they easily could have been.

Definitely a graduation ceremony that I will remember!