By Joe Reavis Over the weekend we attended a couple of high school graduation ceremonies, for Fairfield high school and for Montgomery high school where a nephew walked the stage. The two ceremonies invite some comparison.

Class size is a good place to start. FHS commencement included 127 senior students and Montgomery included 499. Amazingly, both events took about the same time to run.

Montgomery held its graduation indoors, thankfully, at Texas A&M University. Because the site was about an hour from the high school, charter buses were hired to transport students there and back.

The MHS staff ran an assembly line in passing out diplomas. They have enough staff—-I counted six assistant principal names in the program. Students were lined up and each received a card with his/her name on it, then the card was presented to a woman who read off the student’s name when it was their time to cross the stage. Graduates walked briskly across the stage, received their diplomas and stopped at the other side for a picture with the principal. Then it was back to their seats.

The kids at Montgomery had one less stop on their graduation walk. At Fairfield, seniors received their diplomas from the school board president, then were greeted by the superintendent for congratulations and to move their tassle, signifying they had indeed graduated. The Montgomery kids didn’t mess with the tassles. It was a time-saver, I suppose.

Valedictorian and salutatorian speeches were about the same at both schools. The top two students in each class briefly spoke of the value of their high school years and urged classmates on to success in the future. If I remembered the speeches given at my high school graduation decades ago, I imagine they touched on the same themes.

One thing that caught my ear is announcements of how many dollars in scholarships the seniors received. Although the FHS senior class was only one-fourth the size of the MHS class, Fairfield students raked in more money, $1.5 million compared to $1.2 million. That made me proud of our high school and its students.

Cheers erupted from the stands for several graduates at both ceremonies, but at Montgomery someone blasted an air horn and was removed from the gymnasium by police. Let’s give FHS a point for better decorum.

Watching all the students go through graduation ceremonies, I tried to remember back to my own high school commencement. It is pretty much a blank, except for Bobby Mosley.

Bobby was a rodeo cowboy and, to win a bet, was wearing spurs to walk across the stage and receive his diploma. But, there was a snag. Bobby was called up to the stage early with other students in recognition of receiving a college scholarship and someone spied the spurs. A school official pulled Bobby out of line and sat him down on the front row of graduates to take off his spurs, which drew more attention to them that if he would have walked across the stage wearing the spurs.

Over the years, I have attended about 25 commencement exercises for FHS. At every one, I was there taking pictures for the newspaper. Next year, however, will be different because our son will walk the stage and I am planning to watch from the stands instead of working, unless I am ordered to get in the photography pit and snap some pictures for posterity.