The end of the school year brings a bittersweet feeling for seniors as they end their last day of classes and prepare for graduation. Celebrations like Senior Send-off recognize the hard work the seniors have put in over many years, and give them an afternoon of fun before graduation this weekend.
“I’m feeling a lot of things right now, and I’m kind of nervous,” senior Juliet Rosenburg said. “I’m very happy. I’m with all my friends. And, I mean, it’s kind of bittersweet too. It’s kind of sad.”
The Senior Send-off event offers a celebration with pizza, bounce houses, and fun games like volleyball. However, before the seniors participated in Senior Send-off, they had to complete the senior checkout to ensure they were ready for graduation.
“We cleaned up the Chromebooks and we signed out, then we handed them back, and checked them for repairs,” senior Kaylee Stumbaugh said. “Then we check our library records. It took, like, an hour.”
In the past, Metea celebrated seniors by holding an assembly at the end of the year, but due to overlapping dates with AP testing, they chose to do the Senior Send-off event instead.
“We needed to do something a little bit different this year, so a few of us sat down with some students in student government as well as Mr. Panko, Mrs. Oas, Miss Jordan, Mr. DeBrucker, and Mr. Jones,” activities director Heather Weisenburger said. “We all kind of just sat down and talked about what we would want to see and what we could possibly do.”
Outside of Senior Send-off and checkout, Metea has been recognizing its seniors with fun events all throughout the year.
“I did senior sunset earlier in the year and also the Six Flags senior road trip,” senior Jayshawn Edwards said. “Both of those [were] really fun events, I took pictures and everything, and had a lot of fun.”
This is the first year that Metea has planned an event like this, but after positive feedback from students, it is something that Metea hopes to continue for many classes of seniors to come.
“I’d love to get some feedback from the seniors, but it looked like everybody had a really good time,” Weisenburger said. “I would like to see it continue.”