Mortarboard Madness

By Christian Villodas

The square mortarboards that high school graduates don each year are one of the defining symbols of graduation. Though they represent a distinct event, a closing of an important chapter in students’ lives, they have come to take on the more whimsical role as vehicles of self-expression. They allow students to unleash their creative energies.

The mortarboards that capped the heads of this year’s Newtown High School graduates were as varied as the students who wore them.

Graduating senior Elana Bertram, wearing her own glittery 2000 mortarboard, indicated that two of the most striking mortarboards this year were Melissa Fornabia’s blue and gold 2000 and Kest Schwartzman’s lobster with wings.

Some mortarboards had personal meanings. Several students found Adam Ponsky’s mortarboard, with the number 504 on it, interesting. When asked why he elected to decorate his mortarboard in this way, Adam responded, “Because I’m a 504 student with ADHD, and I made it all the way through high school.” The number 504, Adam explained, is “a plan for kids that have trouble learning.”

Other mortarboards amounted to wishful thinking. Senior Derek Delorenzo mused that he would “decorate [my mortarboard] with some women’s phone numbers” following graduation.

Roughly two-thirds of the graduating class saw fit not to decorate their caps, many explaining that they did not have enough time, were too lazy, or simply wanted to maintain tradition. Still, the remaining one-third took to glue, glitter, and golden 2000s, along with one flying lobster and a makeshift photo album.

Students were not the only ones reflecting on mortarboard decoration at last week’s commencement. English teacher Bryan Luizzi recalled that such decoration was a practice back at his own graduation from Brookfield High School. “Some people at Brookfield put ‘BHS’ or peace signs [on their mortarboards], even in 1989.”

Lorrie Arsenian, another English teacher, countered, “We were too sophisticated for that in the 70s.”

As a longtime favorite graduation speaker at the high school, social studies teacher Robert McHugh has seen a lot of mortarboards. When asked about the most memorable mortarboard he had ever seen, he recalled, “I saw one guy that had a hula dancer on the top that moved while he was walking… She was battery operated so she moved around quite a lot.”

Following “Pomp and Circumstance,” on freshly cut grass under a sweltering sky, final words were delivered and those distinct, individualistic mortarboards rose into the heavens, along with the dreams of the Class of 2000.

(Christian Villodas, a high school sophomore, writes regularly for the school’s newspaper, The Hawkeye.)