Sober Grad Night Draws Over 100 For Food, Fun

Out of the 120 that signed up and purchased tickets for the Sober Grad Night at Escalon High School, 115 attended. And they had a full night of fun activities to keep them busy.

The first students arrived shortly after 9:15 p.m., and by 10 p.m., most of the attendees were already in and busy. There was a photo booth, casino games, a caricature artist, a Paint Nite activity, and Henna tattoos. That was all inside the EHS cafeteria; there were also tables set up inside for students to drop their tickets in for a number of different prizes. Grand prizes offered were two $500 cash prizes, a laptop and an Apple watch.

Several other smaller prizes were available as well and each student coming in got to dip into the mystery box, where they won some cash.

Outside, there was a cornhole tournament, laser tag, an inflatable obstacle course, music provided by DJ Sandoval, huge Jenga and Connect 4 games and plenty of food, soda, water, ice tea, coffee and hot chocolate.

New graduate Wesley Keane was staying busy, trying out several of the activities.

"It's probably just being able to run around and have carefree fun with my friends," Keane said of what he was enjoying most, pointing to laser tag and the indoor casino as his favorites. "I’ve looked forward to this for the past week or two."

Sitting down in one of the beach chairs in the cafeteria, Bailey Dugo was taking a brief break just after midnight, as Friday night turned in to Saturday morning.

"It's so much fun; I did not expect so much stuff to be going on so it's super cool, I love it," Dugo said.

"It's fun but it's very tiring," added fellow gradate Mallory Berhorst. "We still feel like we’re high school students, we still feel like we’re going to come here on Monday, it doesn't feel like we’ve graduated."

Both liked trying to tackle the outdoor inflatable obstacle course and Berhorst also had fun painting her Cougar Paw, customizing it to her style.

"It's just a lot of fun stuff to do with your friends and it's fun to hang out one last time," said graduate Hunter Budd, adding that he enjoyed watching the caricature artist at work.

After a few hours of taking part in the games, eating food and making memories, the seniors headed in to the gym, where the final portion of the program included hypnotist Chris Lee, out of Southern California, utilizing some volunteers from the class to help put on a fun and unusual show.