FLORENCE, SC (WBTW) – The Florence School District One school board met last week and decided to distribute graduation tickets differently than it had planned.

School Board Chairman, Barry Townsend, said the district is limited to 4,000 tickets.

Originally, each student in all three high schools was supposed to get 10 tickets, but Townsend said that needed to change based off of graduation class size.

“We asked the administration to go back, and take a look at how we were handling the ticketing situation,” said Townsend. “West Florence and South Florence have roughly 420 graduates, so they’ll have a little more than 4,000 guests at the 10 ticket limit, but Wilson had a substantially smaller graduating class, and so their limit of 10 tickets was still leaving 1,500 available seats,” he continued. “And so the administration decided to distribute those additional tickets, and so the Wilson graduates will have access to 15 in order to fulfill that 4,000 total.”

Rhonda Edwards’ 17-year-old daughter is graduating from Wilson High School. Edwards said parents didn’t find out about the ticketed graduation until April.

“It’s frustrating, I don’t think that it’s fair,” Edwards told News13. “Some type of correspondence should’ve been mailed out to all the seniors parents to let them know that there were going to be possible changes.”

Townsend said the discussion of ticketed graduation had been happening since the school year began.

“I think the district is listening, unfortunately, these were discussions that happened in September, and not everyone comes to the meetings, or sees the newscast,” the Chairman said. “I think that as a district, I’m always interested in finding better ways to communicate with the public. I think that would alleviate a lot of these issues if we actually did a better job of communicating what we’re doing,” he continued. “The ticketing issues, a lot of the parents felt like it was sprung on them at the last moment. They weren’t aware that it had been an ongoing discussion so we can definitely improve in those areas.”

Edwards said she wanted to invite 25 friends and family members, and had to turn away guests.

“I have people that’s traveling six plus hours,” she said. “I would hate for them to come this far, and not be able to attend her graduation.”

Townsend said students are able to turn tickets in that they do not need. 

“Some folks have already turned in tickets they didn’t need, and so there’s a process at the school in order to try and take care of all the ticket requests that are possible,” he said. “At this point, we’re a week out. We are distributing additional tickets to try and make sure that the schools are doing everything they can to redistribute tickets that aren’t needed,” Townsend explained. “There’s an awful lot of plans, and stuff that are put into place, especially regarding security, and safety that frankly we’re not allowed to talk about, and to change those at this late date is just one thing that, unfortunately in the society we’re in today, we can’t compromise those measures.

Townsend said student safety is the biggest priority.

“In the past, they actually tried staging the students outside, and with the heat and stuff had students pass out,” said Townsend. “So you have to have an area to actually stage the students to enter the arena.”

Edwards said she’s disappointed in communication between the district and parents.

“We’re supposed to be Florence School District One, and One stands for unity, and there isn’t any,” Edwards said.

Edwards signed a petition against the tickets, but Townsend said it’s too late to change the system.

“What we have directed the administration to do is, since this is our first year with tickets,” he explained. “We need to be able to control, and be able to know how many  individuals come in and out of the graduation. There are also safety measures that require this as well,” he continued. “Going forward, we’ve asked the administration to study this year’s graduations, and to come back and as soon as this summer, let’s start looking at what worked well, what didn’t, [and] what can we improve for next year? So that we don’t, we’re not springing this on anyone. We’ll get our plan for the 2019 graduation in place, hopefully, if not before the school year starts, early in the school year.”

Florence District 1 Graduation is on Sat. June 2.