The graduation ceremony for seniors is during finals week on Thursday, May 22, in the HEB Center in Cedar Park starting at 12:00 p.m. The ceremony will honor the 2025 senior graduates and celebrate their years in K-12 education.

Graduation should not be during finals week because it causes complications for students and teachers. Students who have siblings graduating or that are obligated to go because of extracurricular activities such as band or choir must take their finals beforehand. This causes a shorter amount of time studying for the student and less time to finish the study guide. This may cause the student to feel unprepared for their final. 

A lot of teachers attend the ceremony to help out or watch their students graduate. This forces the school to have to find substitutes for classes taking finals with missing teachers. This can cause understaffing or having to find a plenitude substitute teachers which can be difficult. Classes not taking finals are bunched together making classes overcrowded and harder for teachers to manage.

Parents, guardians, relatives or even older siblings who are working most likely have to ask off for the graduation ceremony if attending. Some jobs require their workers to have full responsibilities to find someone to cover their shift if they cannot work that day. If graduation was set on a weekend, a significant amount of jobs don’t typically require employees to work on the weekends so taking off work would be unnecessary. 

The ceremony being held on a regular school day causes problems for a multitude of people. To create a more meaningful and memorable graduation, it should be held the day after school is out or the weekend rather than during finals week. This gives students, teachers and families a worry-free time to celebrate this important milestone and conclude the school year.