Going on its 17th year, the Andy Cocagne-Nick Gregory graduation party is one of their SRT’s oldest traditions.

“Years ago, back when I hired in,” social studies teacher Gregory said. “Mr. Cocagne and I had kitty corner classrooms and we thought we should have a graduation party outside in this courtyard. He’s a man who likes to have a good time, I like to have a good time. So we did it in the year 2000 thinking it would just be a thing we might try and then the next year. Well, then it got to be 2010 and we were like ‘we have a decade long streak going we must keep this up’ so this will be the 17th annual Cocagne-Gregory graduation party.”

During the 17 years, the party has had a variety of food and activities ranging anywhere from pizza to putting up tents in the courtyard outside of Gregory’s classroom.

“We’ve done all sorts of things,” Gregory said. “We have barbecued, we have done pizza, we have done tacos, you name a dessert we have done it. We’ve released balloons with little inspirational messages, we’ve had water balloon fights, we’ve had yard games, we even had tents out there once. We have done it all, all in the name of celebrating our seniors.”

As the food is a large part of the party, many students like senior Elise Cassidy look forward to enjoying food with the rest of her SRT.

“I’m looking forward to just getting together with the SRT family one last time,” Cassidy said. “My favorite is probably just eating food and hanging out with everyone.”

Plans for this year’s party on May 23 have already begun, including a variety of desserts.

“This year we will be having hot dogs and ice cream with toppings,” Gregory said. “We do a great job on toppings: we’ll go sprinkles, we’ll go caramel, we’ll go hot fudge, and we’ll go strawberry topping. Sprinkles we won’t just do basic sprinkles, we will have various colors including black and orange. Condiments we don’t mess around; if we are going to do chips we are going to do salsa, were going to have desserts like crazy we are going to have anything from homemade brownies to cookies.

PHOTO Jillian Ferry

Besides just having food at the party, the SRT’s give speeches commemorating the seniors. Each junior is paired up with a senior, and is the one to give the speech about the senior at the graduation.”

“We try to celebrate our seniors by talking a little bit about them, about what they did and what the are planning to do,” Cocagne said. “We give them an opportunity to talk about themselves and Fenton High School and give advise to the underclassmen.”

In her last few days in Gregory’s SRT, senior Kasey Walsh looks forward to spending it with her SRT family.

“I’m looking forward Ice cream,” Walsh said. “I really like ice cream and we are going to be having games outside, too. To me, it means that we’ve been such a good SRT family.”