pixabay / tdfugere
High school (and college) graduations this Spring have looked different than any other time in history. Instead of students wearing their caps and gowns and sitting in tightly packed auditoriums for hours while some person gives a speech about something nobody will ever remember, most of that was done from the comfort of the couch.
But things went down a little differently in The Florida Keys. Somerset Island Prep is a charter school in Key West and this year’s 12 graduating seniors took part in a Jet Ski Graduation ceremony where each student rolled up on a Jet Ski like Kenny Powers to receive their diplomas from the school’s principal who was passing them out from his boat (using a pole to keep a safe distance).
According to reports, the twelve graduating seniors were given free training on how to operate Jet Skis before the ceremony. Not that I think any of them needed it. We’re talking about Key West here. A tiny island where literally everyone who lives there ‘grows up on the water’. I’d be legitimately shocked if a single one of those 12 seniors had never been on a Jet Ski before.
Footage from this graduation ceremony certainly looks a heck of a lot better than how I remember my H.S. graduation:
Somerset Island Prep in Key West, FL found a unique way to honor the Class of 2020 with a jet ski graduation!
In graduation caps, gowns and masks, the students jet skied to their principal who presented them with high school diplomas.#SomersetAcademy #Academica pic.twitter.com/qQtff89FMD
— Academica (@Academica) May 27, 2020
Insider reports that this ceremony was meant to be some sort of metaphor and not just a massive flex about how good life is in Key West:
“This final ceremony for our seniors represents the same theme that has played out throughout the entirety of their time at Island Prep: that no barrier is too large to overcome and that through creativity and hard work we can overcome any challenge,” Tom Rompella, principal of Somerset Island Prep, said in a statement from the school.
The Florida Keys were arguably the strictest region of Florida during the lockdown period. The highway into The Keys was shutdown to everyone that wasn’t a Florida Keys resident to keep outsiders from coming to places like Key West and Islamorada.