2008 Seating Committee Report
The seating committee is responsible for collecting information from the graduates’ families and assigning seating for their immediate family members (parents, grandparents and siblings) at graduation.
The seating requests should be confirmed by the April meeting. It’s also good to ask if any families have members with special needs (i.e. wheelchairs).
Prior to the rehearsal, we made a seating chart and copied it for each family. We also made name cards which we placed on the pews just prior to the rehearsal so everyone could become familiar with their seats.
We tried to seat families on the same side of the sanctuary where their graduates would be — in order to accomplish this, you’ll need to get a final list of graduates divided into “right” and “left” sides of the stage.
We also attempted to give priority seating to those families who had put in a lot of time on graduation (class coordinators and heads of the more work-intensive committees). You can check with the coordinators if you need assistance in this area.
Don’t forget to leave seating for musicians and other ceremony participants who aren’t members of graduates’ families. Also, we neglected to reserve seats for the MPE president and family, which would have been good to do.
One final note — we received the seating chart from 2007 but felt like it would be easier to have an actual “layout” of the sanctuary, which we picked up at College Church. Unfortunately, the layout wasn’t an actual representation of the seating, so we had to make a lot of adjustments on the night of the rehearsal. We’d recommend that you use the seating chart from 2007 or visit College Church and make your own. (Visits to the church building need to be scheduled. Our contact was Dennis Vaverka, building coordinator.)