Knicks championship parade a test for Long Island high schoolers facing exams
James McDonald, his wife, Michelle and their children, from left, Beverly, 2, Kevin, 6, Mikaela, 10, and Vivienne, 12, who will take a makeup exam next week and instead attend the Knicks championship parade Thursday with the rest of her family. Credit: Newsday/Alejandra Villa Loarca
To skip, or not to skip.
That is the question a great many young Long Islanders will face Thursday, when many students are scheduled to take finals or Regents exams but New York City also has scheduled a massive ticker-tape parade for the NBA champion Knicks.
State education officials said Tuesday that the high-stakes Regents exams will go forward. Two science exams are scheduled for 9:15 a.m. and two more for 1:15 p.m. The parade will start at 10 a.m. at Battery Park in lower Manhattan and travel north on Broadway through the Canyon of Heroes.
“Parents will have to have serious conversations with children about choices and priorities,” said Bob Vecchio, executive director of the Nassau-Suffolk School Boards Association. He noted that schedules for the state-mandated exams were set many months before the Knicks began their playoff run. Vecchio said some students need to pass the exams in order to graduate from high school.
Petitioning officials
“If I were in a position where my son or daughter says they want to skip the exam, I would not give them a choice and they would be sitting for the exam,” Vecchio said. “They could watch the parade on TV later.”
Ron Edelson, co-president of ZE Creative Communications, a public relations company that represents many school districts across Long Island, said all his clients expected their students to show up Thursday for Regents exams, and that none would offer an absentee waiver for students who skipped to go to the parade.
Between late Saturday night, when the Knicks beat the San Antonio Spurs and became NBA champions, and midweek, basketball fans — including students, educators and other concerned citizens — started about a dozen Change.org petitions asking city and state officials to either switch the date of the parade, or the date of the Regents.
Copiague High School sophomore Jayden King, here at his Lindenhurst home, started a petition asking state officials to consider moving the Regents exams on Thursday, so students and teachers could attend the New York Knicks ticker tap parade. Credit: Kendall Rodriguez/Kendall Rodriguez
“The exams, while crucial, should not overshadow the unique opportunity to witness and be part of our city's history and unity,” Jayden King, a 10th grader at Walter G. O'Connell Copiague High School, wrote in the petition to state education officials.
“We finally won, and to experience that with my father, especially after we watched every game together going from the Carmelo Anthony era, it meant the world to me,” Jayden, 16, told Newsday. Alas, his earth science Regents exam falls on the day of the parade. When Jayden realized this, “I was pretty crushed,” he said.
Skipping the parade
His father, Peter King, 43, said he would not attend the Knicks parade without his son.
“It won’t be the same without him. … Just like we both experienced the Knicks winning a championship for the first time together, it would have been great if we could have went to the ticker-tape parade. It would have meant a lot to us all to be able to do that,” King said.
Though the Knicks won championships in 1970 and 1973, this will be their first ticker-tape parade; New York City Mayor John Lindsay suspended ticker-tape parades shortly after taking office in 1966, citing disruptions to shopping and traffic, though he made exceptions for NASA lunar landings. In 2000, when the city threw a parade for the World Series-winning Yankees, Mayor Rudy Giuliani said: “Parents can make their own decision in allowing kids to attend the parade." Giuliani added: “It's about fun, enjoyment and civic pride.”
Earlier this week, Mayor Zohran Mamdani declined to offer an opinion when WNYC host Brian Lehrer asked him, jokingly, if students should skip school Thursday. But when NY1’s Pat Kiernan posed a similar question about students scheduled to take the Regents exams, Mamdani said: “My encouragement would be that you should still be taking the Regents.”
The words “history” and “historic” make many appearances in the petitions and in Mamdani's remarks this past week, in reference to the Knicks’ win, the sporting traditions of New York City and the anticipated significance of the upcoming parade.
'Heartbeat' of the future
Michelle Weintraub, 46, a public school teacher from Flushing, Queens, wrote in a petition: “A Knicks championship is history in the making. Our children, who are the heartbeat of this city’s future and its biggest fans, deserve to be part of that history.”
In a text message to Newsday, Weintraub explained that sports were a “deep, generational passion” in her family. The parade would have capped the school year for her daughter Bryn, a Knicks fan who is in the eighth grade at Bell Academy in Queens. But it also would have been one of the last chances for her to celebrate with two family members who love the Knicks as much as she does: Bryn’s grandfather will move to Florida at the end of the month, and her older brother will move upstate this summer to attend SUNY Purchase.
Bryn is scheduled to take a Living Environment Regents exam on Thursday. Weintraub said her daughter was distraught.
“A monumental event like this should be something my entire family, communities throughout our city and state can enjoy together,” Weintraub wrote.
Another petitioner, Carter Coggins, 14, a ninth grader at Walt Whitman High School in the South Huntington district, noted pithily that “teens and teachers proctoring across NYS will miss this once in a lifetime moment. Either move the parade, or move the regents.”
In an interview with Newsday, Carter said school staffers told him “there’s no way you could miss the Regents and retake it in August unless there’s extreme circumstances … They made me write on an index card today: my name, my parents name, their phone number, their email. It’s like, if you don’t show up, we’re calling everything.”
In Rockville Centre, artist James McDonald said he hoped to attend the parade with his wife, Michelle, and their four children. But their eldest, Vivienne, 12, a sixth grader at South Side Middle School, had a math final set for Thursday.
McDonald said he wanted his children to see the champions.
“What I try to instill in them in sports is just getting better at something, staying with it, progressing … and learning to overcome hardships,” he said.
Vivienne was not optimistic, after testing the waters at school with a teacher who is a Knicks fan: “She’s like, ‘Yeah, go to the final.’ ”
But late Tuesday, McDonald said Vivienne had gotten a reprieve. "She will be able to go," he said. "They are going to do a makeup test next week."
