Weather has not been kind to the Vicksburg Warren School District this year and Monday reiterated that fact by dumping between 9 and 16 ½ inches of rain on Vicksburg and Warren Central high schools.

The result of so much water was a scramble by the school district to salvage the traditional outdoor graduation ceremonies at the high schools.

The two principals with foresight and the safety of everyone attending the ceremonies in mind made the wise decision to look indoors for a place to host the events.

“With 16 ½ inches of rain, if we waited until Thursday and then told parents they were only going to get two tickets, all these people who are supposed to come wouldn’t have been able to come,” Warren Central High School principal Jamie Creel said. “I can’t perceive us getting a chair on that field even if we don’t get any more rain the rest of the week, it’s that saturated.”

Bearing in mind with family and friends all wanting to attend, the VWSD looked to the largest indoor venue in our community, the Vicksburg Convention Center.

“The principals of the high schools came to us and asked if we could pay for them to have graduation ceremonies in the convention center,” assistant superintendent David Campbell said. “We had to see if the convention center was even available,” Campbell said.

With events planned from Friday through the weekend, that left only one viable option open to the schools, a dual graduation on Thursday. Vicksburg had already planned to hold their graduation ceremony that day, so the only change was a bump up in the scheduled time.

Warren Central on the other hand was going to have to move their ceremony up a day.

“It was just happenstance that we are available Thursday and I’m just thrilled that we’re able to accommodate both graduations in the same day.” Kirklin said.

“There will be a lot of coordination with both schools.”

Vicksburg High School will hold its graduation at 4 p.m. and Warren Central’s will begin at 8 p.m.

The only other viable alternative was hold graduation in the gym and seating would have been limited to two attendees per graduate.

“We tried to make the best decision to allow the most amount of people to come, and at least we’re able to give each graduate nine tickets,” Creel said.

Knowing that space will be limited, the VWSD and VCC has made every effort to ensure as many people as possible can attend the ceremonies.

“We started working out how many we could seat. We’ll have 2,000 people in the audience on the ground floor, and overflow in grandstand seating upstairs,” Kirklin said.

“The ceremony will be piped throughout the building and shown on screens.”

“What we’re looking at now is holding 2,500 for each graduation,” she said. “We can comfortably seat that many and that’s not counting graduates.”

The school district will provide transportation from the two parking structures on Mulberry Street to the convention center, Campbell said. Both events will also be streamed live over the Internet.

The school district will also dismiss all schools early on the 60 percent day schedule.

The VWSD has to be commended for making the best with the hand they dealt. By coordinating with each other the two principals were able to decide what they both needed to ensure the one thing all high school seniors look forward to would still happen.

The central office deserves credit for footing the unplanned expense of paying for a venue, printing tickets to graduation and overtime for the bus staff that will provide transportation from car to venue door.

The VCC did an outstanding job of quickly implementing a plan to host as many attendees as possible and to do that twice in a matter of hours.

With cooperation anything is possible.