Honestly-- commencement was just such a mess-- for SO many reasons.
I just wish that we'd been able to get information enough to make a reasonably informed decision, but there again-- this is how these things tend to go. You ask all the right questions, but this stuff just doesn't cross other people's minds. They don't connect the dots-- and because they don't, they also tend to not think to tell YOU that there, um-- is a dot there. Even when you ask.
So there was a lot of chaos, a lot of relatively low supervision, and a LOT of time, some of it crossing meal/snack times. No teenager is going to go from 1pm until 8pm with no food, and the school just never "got" why I was concerned about it at all. They also communicated poorly with catering, had no real plan for having a trained staff member there with my child (but excluded US, too), etc. etc. etc.
Add in some really unfortunate social stuff with my daughter at the epicenter, and it was just not something that DD felt that she could go through with. It's sad-- but it happens. That is our life, basically. She was a lot less upset about that than most kids would have been. She is used to it.
