A tradition preserved. Graduate Emily Crelin with her grandfather, who had also graduated in the Great Auditorium. Photo by Mary Walton

By Kat Cavano

The graduating class of Neptune High School gathered at the Great Auditorium Friday night for a ritual dating back seven decades.  Girls in white gowns and boys in black exchanged hugs and kisses with their classmates and posed for pictures snapped by proud parents.  Like the thunder and lightning that swept through Ocean Grove just an hour before the 320 graduates assembled, a stormy controversy that had threatened to derail the ceremony receded in the joy of the moment.

But the evidence was there.  A bouquet of colored balloons masked a small cross outside the building; within the auditorium, school banners were draped across two religious signs over the stage; the illuminated cross on the front of the auditorium remained dark.  Covering those religious symbols was key to an agreement between the Neptune Township School District and the American Civil Liberties Union after a woman complained that the graduation ceremony in the auditorium, a place of worship, violated the separation of church and state.

And so a tradition was preserved. Graduate Emily Crelin of Shark River Hills said she cherished the fact that she was literally following in the footsteps of her grandfather, Bob Crelin, who was at her side as she spoke. He graduated from ‘Old’ Neptune High School in 1957 and also received his diploma in the Great Auditorium. Emily also had an important role to play in Friday’s ceremony, delivering the “Passing of the Torch” speech to the class below hers. She would tell them, she said, to “live it up, because senior year is just going to fly by.”

“It’s finally my time,” she said, clutching a half dozen red roses to her chest. All the female graduates received a similar bouquet. “And graduating here is very prestigious.”

Graduate Danny Oquendo. Photo by Mary Walton

Danny Oquendo was the first Neptune High graduate in his family, but he, too, had strong feelings about the ceremony in the Great Auditorium. “Ocean Grove is like a second home to me in the summer,” he said. “The Auditorium has such a long history, it’s special.”

The event drew a clutch of protesters from Point Pleasant Beach who objected to the Neptune School Board’s concessions to the ACLU. Calling themselves Citizens for a Free America, they handed out flyers and small crosses. It was “absurd,” said one, to allow “the government to run religion.” Another said the agreement was a form of censorship. “Our founding fathers would be spinning in their graves,” she said.

Protesters said the compromise was "absurd." Photo by Tracey James