Getting students to the stage on graduation night takes years of work by administrators and teachers, but making sure students’ names are pronounced correctly is a process in itself.
Sahuarita High School and Walden Grove High School each have around 250 graduating seniors — that's 500 names to practice before the big night in May.
“They’re graduating from high school. This is a celebration of them, a celebration of their accomplishment, so we really want to take care with making sure that the pronunciation of their names are correct," WHGS Assistant Principal Kreston Elchert said.
Kreston Elchert
Elchert will be reading the Red Wolves’ names this year. Assistant Principal Yvette Favela will do the honors for the Mustangs.
“I have a name that's mispronounced quite often, so for me that's always stuck in my mind. It doesn't feel good,” Favela said. “ It's something that has stuck with me over the years, so I take this very seriously.”
Yvette Favela
The name-reading process for graduation is long and begins early on.
“She goes through and checks in with all of them now, fourth quarter, so that she has plenty of time to get through all of the names and make sure that she's practicing it correctly," SHS Principal Stephanie Magnuson said.
Favela has already received the list of names and their accomplishments, which will also be read on stage, and is beginning to check in with students.
“I will be checking in with the students just to make sure that I have it down exactly the way they want me to say it," she said.
Walden Grove’s process begins with their first graduation practice.
“There’s quite a bit of work that goes into making sure we get those names right,” Elchert said. “The very first one, we go through and we meet with each individual student and we say, ‘How do you want your name to be read on stage?’ We’ll listen to what they say. We’ll make phonetic notes on their note card, and then we'll read it back to them several times until we get it right.”
Favela says she'll have all the notes at the podium.
“If the names are rare names, my notes might have the phonetic spelling of the name to remind me how I'm supposed to say it," she said.
By the time graduation night finally rolls around, the name readers will have practiced names with students three to four times at check-ins and practices. But that doesn’t include the administrator's own time.
“Obviously, on my personal time, I will practice just to make sure I have the cadence correctly,” Favela said. “My family knew what I was doing when they could hear me saying their names.”
Magnuson said at the end of the day, practice makes perfect.
“If you think about it, it's kind of like muscle memory,” she said. “If you practice with the right cadence, then in the moment when you’re nervous and you’re kind of shaky and you’re having all the feels of watching your kids cross the stage, that muscle memory kicks in and you can still get it right.”
A lot of times, cultural and linguistic differences are taken into consideration when reading names.
“A lot of our students have names that can be pronounced both in English and in Spanish, so when I check in, the types of questions that I ask them will be, how will you like me to say your name,” Favela said. “And that's exactly what I ask them, ‘Do you want me to say it in English or do you want me to say it in Spanish?’”
Another thing to consider is how parents want their student's name pronounced.
“If a student wants a completely different name, we reach out to parents beforehand to make sure that parents are OK with it,” Magnuson said.
Administrators also come across students who have multiple names, want a variation of their name, need Jr. to be read as part of their name or even want their middle name read instead of their first.
“Sometimes students are like, ‘That's good enough,’” Elchert said. “We’re not going for good enough. We're going for exactly how you want it read."
If a name is mispronounced, Magnuson chalks it up to nobody’s perfect.
“Our families know us,” she said. “This is a family here. It's more of we’re all human. There's grace given.”
In the end, administrators work hard to put in the effort to read student’s names right and make everybody's big night memorable.
“It's important to me and I completely understand that it’s important to the students,” Favela said. “It's important to their families. It is their moment, so I will definitely put in the time that I need to put in to be ready for it.”
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