Seating Fiasco At Graduation

BROOKSVILLE - It was pandemonium.

On what should have been a happy occasion for local students, dozens of angry parents and family members waited outside guarded doors at the Hernando High School gymnasium on Tuesday, clamoring to gain access the graduation ceremony taking place inside.

"Our whole family had tickets. I don't know what the tickets were for," said Brooksville resident Kelly Eikenberry, whose younger brother, Shane, was one of the graduates.

"It was a fiasco. That's what it was," said Eikenberry, who watched her brother graduate on a large, closed-circuit TV screen inside school's auditorium. She was one of nearly 200 family members and friends who were guided into the auditorium, or "overflow room," due to lack of space.

Dressed in traditional purple caps and gowns, the students filed past their waiting families into the gym, causing parents to shout loudly at Hernando County Sheriff's deputies guarding the doors.

Inside the packed gym, 70 teachers and staff members left their seats to allow more parents inside. One parent became so agitated that she was led away, and a student started to cry when she realized her parents were still standing outside.

Superintendent Wayne Alexander said the school's fire code dictates how many people the gym can hold, and that school staff and deputies tried their best to move people in as quickly as possible.

Most of the waiting parents were eventually offered a seat inside, though many headed for the auditorium when the ceremony started.

Alexander said much of the confusion was caused by family members who arrived after the suggested 7:15 p.m. arrival time for the 7:30 p.m. ceremony.

But parents told a different story.

Brooksville resident Jamie Brooks, whose son, Kyle, graduated Tuesday, said the family arrived at 6:45 p.m. to a full gymnasium, guarded doors and a disgruntled mass of ticket-holders waiting outside.

"People were saying, 'But I have a child graduating,' and the response was, 'So does everybody else,'" she said.

Each student was given six tickets for guests. But with nearly 300 seniors in the school's graduating class, that's nearly 1,800 tickets - plus the students themselves - for a building with a maximum capacity of far less.

"This wasn't a surprise," Brooks said. "They distributed the tickets, and they should have been able to do the math and figure out it wasn't going to work. I just don't know how it could have been planned so poorly."

Brooks, who eventually got into the gym to see her son accept his diploma but missed the opening procession, said she was disappointed in the way the situation was handled.

"The way I look at it, they knew they had a problem at 6:45 p.m.," she said. "They could have solved everything by (quickly) recognizing there was problem and moving the ceremony to the stadium."

Brooks said she felt particularly sorry for the 10 deputies manning the doors, who took the brunt of parents' anger.

"Those poor guys were catching it for more than an hour," she said. "They didn't have anything to do with it, but there was no one else to talk to. There wasn't anyone in charge."

Administrators could not remedy the situation because they were part of the ceremony, though assistant principals eventually jumped in to help with reseating efforts.

"They robbed a lot of kids of the joy of (graduating), and they can't make that right," she said. "But they certainly need to make some adjustments to make sure it doesn't happen again."

And that's the plan for next year, Alexander said.

"Next year, we will resolve this issue by having the ceremony outdoors as we do at every other high school," he said. "Then this won't be an issue because there are ample seats on the football field."

"We have corrected the situation and it will not happen again," Alexander added.