you live under a rock? We had 5th grade grad ceremony (elementary) 1973. Junior high 1976. We certainly weren't the only school. All my kids (different school districts) have over the last 25 years. Like I said this is nothing new, not even close.
I swear to you we had NONE of that growing up in NY. Just didn't exist. Never even heard of it. You just had senior graduation and that was it. School's done? Okay, we're moving on to summer.
I posted the graduation ceremony question to my friends on FB and so far, none of them recall any graduation ceremony outside of senior graduation.
I will say that we did have Regents in NY which is a state issue exam. You had to pass the final exam in order to move up to the next grade (regardless of how you did during the year) and that was pretty much at the last week of the school year, so they didn't really have time for all of these graduation ceremonies. Then again, Regents really didn't start until 9th grade either.
Also, I had never heard of somebody using a 'switch' to beat their kids and their parents making their child get the 'switch' until I was talking about it with a co-worker of mine about 5 years ago.
YR
