After speculation on whether or not the district should move the location of graduation, Principal John Burdett sent an email out to parents Thursday night stating that the ceremony is now at The Star in Frisco.

Since The Star only allows clear bags of belongings into their venue, the district said they will communicate an order form for clear “Prosper” bags that can be purchased to accommodate this requirement.

“We ran into a situation last year at graduation that families were having to split up,” Assistant Principal Gerald Parr said. “We basically didn’t have enough seating and we’ve increased  the number of graduates by over 150 this year, which exponentially increases the number of families and family members that want to attend.”

Schools in the past such as McKinney Boyd which used the Prestonwood Baptist Church in the past have allowed six tickets for each graduate, and Parr said that was a situation that the district did not want to put Prosper parents in.

“We started to actively look for different venues that could possibly hold the amount of people we need and still have the pageantry of a nice venue,” Parr said. “We eventually found The Star.”

Parr also said that the district had been on the quest to find a bigger for months, long before McKinney pulled from the Prestonwood Baptist Church to the Allen Event Center amid church-and-state concerns, so that was not considered. 

Earlier in the week and when the location of graduation was unofficial, 100 juniors and seniors were surveyed on what religious buildings they would be comfortable with graduating at as well as what faith they are.

A little over half of these students were Catholic or Christian, and although many students did not care what religious building graduation was at, a Baptist Church was the most preferred.  Prosper mom Janie Oyakawa, who speaks about the separation of church-and-state in McKinney and Prosper, said she thinks it was inappropriate for the district to have had graduation at Prestonwood in the past.

“I know that it’s a majority Christian community but that does not represent all the students and it doesn’t make all of the students comfortable,” Mrs. Oyakawa said. “I would have probably been okay with it if it was an incredibly good deal for the ISD to do it there but I’m finding out the exorbitant cost it was at Prestonwood that made it even more inappropriate to me.”

Mrs. Oyakawa has two kids who attend the high school and her sophomore daughter, Ella Oyakawa was Mormon until she was 12, now an atheist. She also thinks that it is only appropriate that the location of the graduation ceremony has moved.

“I’m glad that it’s being held at a place where people can feel free to be themselves,” Oyakawa said. “It’s going to be at a stadium, not a place where there are religious memorabilia because now people can bring their families and feel comfortable with their own celebrations.”

Oyakawa also said that she has many friends that are Christian and has no issue with religion, but that is hard for many to understand.

“People think that [being Atheist] automatically correlates with me hating religion or hating people who are religious, which isn’t true,” Oyakawa said. “I think that religion has some beautiful aspects to it, the community some people find in it, some of the beauty in, but I also think there are of course many downsides to it. I think that people can have their own beliefs but I don’t think that they should be pushing that onto other people’s graduation. A ceremony that shows that they have been educated and that they are going on in life.”

Mrs. Oyakawa also said that she also thinks that there is a little hypocrisy in that if the ceremony was held at a religious building of any other faith, there would be more people who were concerned. Ultimately, she left it up to her son Benjamin to decide whether or not he would attend.

“Benjamin did want to go to graduation, so we were already planning to just deal with it and go to Prestonwood,” Mrs. Oyakawa said. “We will still be attending now that it’s moved and we will be very pleased for whatever reason that it isn’t at Prestonwood. It still does kind of disappoint me though that some people are like ‘this has nothing to do with it being a church, it is just because this other venue will suit us better,’ and I wish that people could grasp the importance of the issue but regardless, we will be at graduation.”