High school reunions going strong despite presence of social media

Debbie Gathagan, 67, said planning a class reunion is a lot like planning a wedding.

Gathagan’s last name was Tedesco when she graduated from Penn Hills in 1974. She stayed in the area until she moved to Plum about two years ago.

After 20 years without seeing most of her previous classmates, her friend Chris Whalen persuaded her to plan a 50-year class reunion. Gathagan was not class president. She said Whalen kept asking her until she said yes. He cited her organization and leadership skills as to why she would be the perfect head of the committee.

According to reunionclass.com, about 40% of people in the United States will attend at least one of their high school reunions. According to statistics from Whitman, Amherst and Smith College, this percentage drops as time goes on, and the number of reunions hosted is predicted to drop, as well.

The decreasing statistics can be traced to multiple factors, including the amount of work reunions take to plan, the increase in difficulty to travel that comes with age and, possibly the most cited, the rise of social media and the ability to keep up with others without having to leave the house.

While social networks have taken away the ability of high school reunions to look like a reenactment of “Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion,” a 2018 article by Ellen Caldwell comes to the defense of the high school reunion, calling them an anchor to the past, giving scholars a unique opportunity to study “an intersection of the past with the present,” and offering a view into the many ways in which people construct their own inward and outward senses of identity.

“Since it’s our 50th, and (Whalen) bugged me for a number of years, the two of us decided, ‘OK, it’s time to do this,’ ” Gathagan said.

She and Whalen formed a committee of 15 classmates and met once a month to plan the reunion. She said there were some unexpected bumps in the road during the planning process.

“The hard part that we thought would be easy was finding 1,200 classmates,” she said. “It wasn’t as easy as we’d thought.”

Gathagan said they divided the yearbook among committee members and began reaching out to their previous classmates through email and social media. There also was a group created on Facebook for the class to join. About 188 classmates agreed to go. In addition to the 1,200 students in Gathagan’s senior class, an invitation was also extended to the 1973 and 1975 graduating classes as well.

To go all out for the 50th reunion, Gathagan and the rest of the committee planned a multiple-day celebration over the weekend of June 7. A Friday morning tour of the new-to-them Penn Hills High School kicked off the event. Then, Gathagan and the committee arranged a golf outing for Friday afternoon.

“We had 50 people sign up for the school tour,” she said. “We had 55 people coming to the golf event.”

For the main event, the reunion committee planned a dinner and party Saturday at the DoubleTree in Monroeville — that is, until it closed in February.

“That was the worst part of the planning,” Gathagan said.

After scrambling to call surrounding venues with availability for June 8, they landed on the DoubleTree in Downtown Pittsburgh.

“We have 19 states being represented, from Albuquerque all the way to the East Coast,” she said. “We decided that we needed a hotel.”

The attendees were able to attend the event with a photo booth, live music, food and a memorabilia table for $65 each. There was a video made in memory of 150 classmates who had passed before the reunion.

Looking back on the planning process, Gathagan thinks 20 years went by between reunions because of the sheer amount of work it takes to plan the event.

“Nobody wanted to do the work,” she said. “Plain and simple. It’s a lot of work.”

She said she understood why people shied away from planning the events. The committee for the 30th reunion had hired a third-party company to plan it.

Derailed by covid

Kalie DeFillippo, 27, graduated from Trinity High School in Washington County in 2015. She said her class had discussed planning a five-year reunion but that idea fell apart once covid hit.

“They had to cancel our five-year reunion, and there’s been no talk of a 10-year or any reunion of the sort,” she said.

DeFillippo said it’d be nice to reconnect with people she hasn’t spoken to in a while. Despite still speaking with a number of her high school friends, she said she’s lost touch with a lot of her classmates.

“I’d like to catch up with everybody and see how they’re progressing with their life,” she said. “I always find it interesting to see what career path people have taken and the different life paths as well.”

While social media has become a consistent part of people’s day-to-day routine, and an easy way to keep up to date with people’s lives, it still presents its limits that face-to-face reconnection does not.

“I keep in touch with a lot of people on social media,” DeFillippo said. “Especially being from the area and staying in the area, you see a lot of people (around). You do lose touch with an immense amount of people at the same time.”

Despite recognizing that social media is a useful tool to keep in touch with people, DeFillippo said she finds herself valuing in-person connections more than virtual ones.

“I’m more of an in-person type of person,” she said. “That’s why I would prefer to do a high school reunion. I think the older that you get, and maybe this stops with my generation, but I see myself weaning off of social media.”

She said she finds herself busy with life and isn’t able to maintain virtual conversations as much as she used to.

“I’ve always been interested (in a class reunion),” she said. “It’s about connections, too. Even if you’ve only been out of high school for four or five years, that’s still a prime time when you’re going into the next phase of your life. It’s great for people to connect and keep that connection alive.”

She said high school reunions serve as a great place for new friendships and rekindled connections.

Attendance options

Chaz Shipman, 38, graduated from Burrell High School in 2004.

After celebrating his 10-year reunion with a banquet-style dinner and after-party at a formal venue, Shipman decided to aim for a more laid-back type of gathering for his class’s 20-year reunion at the beginning of July.

“We didn’t want to make a formal banquet,” Shipman said. “After speaking with some of our classmates, we wanted something (with) no pressure.”

The two-day celebration included two events, one family-friendly and the other geared more toward adults.

The first was a restaurant meeting at the Snyders Bonfire restaurant in Leechburg.

“People can bring their families and come and go as they please,” he said.

The second event took place later that night at Voodoo Brewery in New Kensington.

“People have the flexibility to come to whichever event they want to come to,” Shipman said. “We just want to get everyone together because it’s been quite some time.”

He said he wanted to make the two options as easy as possible for people to attend.

“People are eager to see how others are doing after not seeing each other for decades,” Shipman said. “I loved going to Burrell. I was born and raised there, and I think we had a great class.”

As class president, this is the second reunion Shipman has planned for his class — the first being the 10-year reunion. He said the committee isn’t opposed to widening or shortening the time until the next one, but he wants to hear what his classmates have to say before making any changes.

“I just felt 10 and 20 years allows someone to be a little established,” he said.

He said he relied on word-of-mouth from other classmates, social media, advertisements in the newspaper and alerts from the school district to get the word out about the reunion.

Shipman lives in Sarver but will always have a soft spot for Burrell.

“I think one of the most important parts of people’s life is keeping connections,” he said. “I owe a lot to Burrell and what they’ve done for me.”