TURNERS FALLS — The Gill-Montague Regional School District School Committee voted Tuesday to allow the Turners Falls High School senior class to choose a unified color scheme for their graduation caps and gowns.
Originally, Turners Falls High School cap and gown colors followed age-old tradition: girls would wear white and boys would wear blue. In recent years, the school deviated from this tradition in an effort to be more considerate of students’ gender identities, allowing each student to individually select which of the two colors they’d prefer to wear. Now, each student in the graduating class will don the same color — or combination of colors — in an effort to promote unity.
Superintendent Brian Beck spearheaded and announced the concept at the School Committee’s Tuesday night meeting. Although he hadn’t played a part in conceptualizing it, Principal Christopher Barnes endorsed the decision.
“Personally, I think it’s a great idea,” Barnes said. “We’re looking for inclusivity.”
Beck added that not only will students have the agency to vote on one color for the class, but on a design that sports a combination of colors on each cap and gown.
“I think what’s very likely to happen is that they’ll find a combination of the blue and white — the school colors — that they’ll live with,” Beck said. “The most important thing in adopting this policy is giving the selection to the students and making sure that it’s unified.”
School Committee member William Tomb said this is a positive idea not only for its consideration of gender identity within the gender binary, but its transcendence of it.
“I think the original movement was to take gender out of the color, rather than to make a statement about preferential gender,” Tomb said. “I think combining the colors is a great way to take gender out of the colors and still represent whatever they represent for the school district.”
Paige Sulba, Class of 2022 Officer-at-Large, agreed that the change would help the class seem more “unified.”
Dylan Burnett, vice president of the Class of 2022, expressed support, too.
“I think it will look nice, everyone together,” he said.
Emily Young, president of the Class of 2022, said while she doesn’t denounce the idea, she doesn’t think giving the class an option to vote on a unified color would make for much contention.
“I think everyone’s going to choose blue,” she said.
Despite their opinions on the decision, students voiced frustration that they weren’t involved in the decision-making process alongside the School Committee.
“I would’ve had a meeting with the senior class to get a consensus overall,” Burnett said.
The school plans to rent the gowns each year based on how students vote.
Reach Julian Mendoza at 413-772-0261, ext. 261 or
jmendoza@recorder.com.