WP SLE opening/closing parent question

Son 2 accepted to SLE for 1st session. He wants to fly alone to NY. What is the opening and closing like for parents?

I honestly don't want to miss a thing but we need to firm up plans this weekend. We have airfare on SW going to and from reserved for him. If the entire merry band of people attend, we will drive from southern Ohio. We plan on attending the closing ceremony.

Thanks in advance!

Angela

Love4monsters said:

Son 2 accepted to SLE for 1st session. He wants to fly alone to NY. What is the opening and closing like for parents?

I honestly don't want to miss a thing but we need to firm up plans this weekend. We have airfare on SW going to and from reserved for him. If the entire merry band of people attend, we will drive from southern Ohio. We plan on attending the closing ceremony.

Thanks in advance!

Angela

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If I recall the opening had a sort of briefing for the parents, questions answered about WP in general. The closing was cool, had a small band doing great music and a keynote speaker as well as awards for the attendees, very worthwhile.

Opening is pretty much just a drop off.

There is a closing ceremony but it is no huge loss if you can't attend. When my son attended it rained heavily that day and we all got completely soaked. WP did a thoroughly unimpressive job of dealing with the transportation logistics (and here I thought the army specialized in logistics) of getting all the students and their parents up to the parking lots. My memory of the day might be nicer if it had been a bright, sunny day.

Since we are only few hours away, we attended both.

After you drop off your DD/DS, they go off with their squad leader and parents have option to attend a hour long briefing where they explained the admissions process. We decided to attend and sat though the duration however, little by little, people started to leave 1/2 hour into it... Maybe because they were already aware or just bored.

Closing ceremony was short and cool to see. You will find closing ceremony video or two on YouTube. They march in, couple speeches later, they march right. Parents then will walk over to the barrack and wait for them to walk down (100+ at a time) with their belongings. It was nice to see all of the young men and women march down as a group but it was little chaos trying to locate my DS. Mine was in the last group...

Well, hopefully weather will cooperate that day.