A story came out today about how eight Los Angeles-area high schools are denying seniors the right to walk across the stage during graduation to receive their diplomas if they don't specify their future post-secondary education or training (that includes college, community college, and the military). Let's talk about how much I object to this, shall we?

First of all, those kids earned the right to walk across that stage. Whatever plans they have post-graduation is none of the school's business. There's no law that states that they have to do anything after they leave high school, and there's no ruling that they can enforce to keep those kids from being recognized at their own graduation. To try to dictate to these kids that they have to have some kind of plans in order to be included in their own graduation reaches far beyond the limits of the school's jurisdiction. If they're trying to entice the students to form some post-high school plans, this is not the way to do it. That is their event, not the school's to control.

A student interviewed for the article said that a lot of students will probably lie about their college plans. Personally, I think it's none of the school's business what these students do after they walk out that door. If it were me, I'd tell the school to mind theirs when they asked me what I was doing after graduation, and if I was being denied the right to walk across that stage, I would get up in the middle of the graduation ceremony and walk across the stage myself just to prove the point that it was my right to take part, and maybe to show the parents what kind of megalomaniacs their school administrators are.