Public Schools Used COVID To Kill Milestones. Parents Must Fight Back.

This article is part of Upstream, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.

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Every year around this time, a familiar debate ignites about kindergarten graduations. On one side, the naysayers insist it’s absurd to throw a ceremony for a child who has accomplished nothing more than survive the lunchroom and learn his ABCs. On the other, sentimental moms line up with their phones out, ready to capture a pint-sized graduate in a delightfully tiny cap and gown.

There’s no settling that debate — because whether a five-year-old needs a diploma is genuinely a matter of preference. But there’s a related question that gets almost no attention, and it’s the one I actually care about: When a school cancels a tradition and never brings it back, is it teaching kids that their milestones don’t really matter?

I found out the answer to that firsthand.

The post-COVID world rearranged a lot of things that used to be customary. Stores that ran 24 hours now close at 9. Parents who used to read to kindergarten classes as “mystery readers” haven’t been invited back, with no real explanation and no timeline for return. Small, ordinary rituals went away in 2020 and then never came back because nobody in charge had a reason to bring them back.

At my kids’ elementary school, one of the casualties was the third grade moving-up ceremony. This annual ritual didn’t involve hours of names being read in a crowded arena. It was simpler than that, just a short recognition that the kids who’d spent four years in the same hallways, with the same teachers, were about to leave it all behind for middle school. It was perfectly done, not excessive in the least. And then, like the mystery readers, it just stopped happening.

I found out what was lost when my son came home with his official third-grade diploma — the kind that used to be handed out in front of his class — crumpled at the bottom of his backpack, mixed up with broken crayon stubs and the accumulated debris of the school year. Nobody had announced his name or clapped for him. This certificate of achievement went from a filing cabinet to a backpack to the trash, where the only ceremony was me unfolding it and wondering if things could be different. 

I emailed the principal. When that didn’t get results, I went to the superintendent. I was prepared to go to the school board next, and I said so.

At one point during our meeting, the superintendent leaned back in his chair and asked me, “Why does this matter to you so much anyway? The kids don’t care.”

He might be right that an eight-year-old isn’t heartbroken to skip walking across the stage to accept a diploma, beyond being upset that he doesn’t have an excuse to miss class. But that question missed the point. 

These ceremonies aren’t just for the kids. They’re also for the parents who have spent four years packing lunches and signing reading logs and watching a kid go from barely able to tie his shoes to becoming someone almost unrecognizable. And even if it were just for the kids, there is merit in making a big deal out of milestones. 

My husband, for the record, was not on my side of this fight. He’s in the camp that sees kindergarten graduations and moving-up ceremonies as, in his words, “celebrating mediocrity.” He likes to invoke Bob Parr, better known as Mr. Incredible, from the 2004 Pixar film, in the scene where his wife gives him grief for skipping his son Dash’s school ceremony.

“It is not a graduation. He is moving from the 4th grade to the 5th grade. It’s psychotic,” Mr. Incredible says, becoming genuinely angry about the topic. “They keep inventing new ways to celebrate mediocrity, but when someone is genuinely exceptional, what do they do?”

Daily Wire host Matt Walsh also spoke out against kindergarten graduation last month, responding to a viral clip of a kid fidgeting through his kindergarten graduation. He posted in response to the video, “When I am president I will ban ‘kindergarten graduations’ and impose steep retroactive fines on every school that has had one over the past 20 years.”

“The Incredibles” speech resonates with conservatives because it’s true that participation trophies are a problem. But the real argument here isn’t that moving up one grade is a huge achievement; it’s that as a society, we’ve gone from celebrating everything to caring about nothing. Acknowledging a milestone, however ordinary, teaches a child that ordinary milestones are still worth noticing. That’s a different claim than “everyone gets a trophy.” A ceremony that takes 10 minutes and ends with a photo for the family album is just worth it.

There’s a wider version of this happening outside of school gymnasiums, and it’s the same instinct: nothing is formal anymore. There was a time, inside living memory for many, when women put on gloves and heels to go to the grocery store. Now, wearing pajama pants to run errands is just a given. It’s all part of the trend, which is watching formality disappear from everything in life.

Kids notice it and emulate it. If nothing at school is ever treated as a big deal — not finishing elementary school, not the transition into a building three times the size, and leaving childhood behind — then the lesson isn’t “stay humble.” It’s “none of this counts.” 

I won the battle with the school eventually. The superintendent approved bringing the ceremony back, and this year, for the first time since before COVID, the gym was full of adorable graduates called up one at a time to shake the principal’s hand and smile for the misty-eyed moms. My daughter was one of them, and it made me so happy.

I say, keep the kindergarten graduations. They’re little for such a short time, and we moms deserve every photo op we can get.