MOUNT VERNON — Maybe high school students really aren’t all that different today in comparison to the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s. At least, Mount Vernon High School doesn’t think so.
On Thursday, Supt. Bill Seder opened up the doors of MVHS’s gym and theater to more than 240 senior citizens for the school’s biannual Senior Citizens Luncheon.
Thirteen years ago, Seder decided to have current high school students sit down, share a meal and, most importantly, talk with the senior citizen alumni who came before them.
“Oftentimes, as we get older, we worry about our younger generation, and we may hear things that may be true, but oftentimes not,” Seder said.
To combat the occasional misconception, this event provided an opportunity for students and seniors to share stories and discover that the groups have more in common than not.
The students who were at the event are members of the National Honor Society, with one or two of them sitting at nearly 50 tables of seniors, serving the food, starting conversations and cleaning the table when it was all said and done.
“They’ll [senior citizens] ask the students questions, and the students will ask the seniors questions; it just makes for a really unique connection and I think that’s the beauty of it,” Seder said.
The fun continues
After lunch, the two groups gathered in the theater next door.
There, the seniors got to see East Elementary first through fourth graders’ reading of the military-themed children’s book H is for Honor.
East Elementary did the same performance just a few days ago to honor Veterans Day.
Additionally, the MVHS Drama Club performed a snippet of their upcoming fall play, Play On! The play will be performed on Friday and Saturday, and was last performed in 2022.
Wrapping up the afternoon, Seder shared some slang from when the seniors would’ve been in high school to today’s teenage slang and passed out several holiday gifts.
The unsurprising crowd pleaser for the slang segment was when Seder explained the internet phenomenon “6-7” to a room full of senior citizens, perfectly representing that things haven’t changed so much after all.
Below is a gallery from the event. Photo credit: Jack Slemenda
