Wheatland webcast worldwide

A live webcast Friday of the Wheatland High School graduation allowed members of the United States military serving in Iraq and Afghanistan to watch their sons and daughters receive diplomas.

"That's an awesome opportunity for our people," said Sgt. Zachary Wilson of Beale Air Force Base, less than 10 miles from the school. "A lot of events get missed overseas."

Students cheered Friday when plans for the webcast were announced, said Patty Agles, a counselor at Wheatland High.

About 30 percent of the students have parents who are deployed from Beale. More than a dozen airmen were expected to view the webcast, first undertaken in 2005, and watch the graduation from halfway around the world.

Agles recalled the reaction of an airman in Iraq who in 2006 was able to watch his son graduate.

"It was very emotional to be able to see that," Agles said of the airman viewing the webcast.

Mick Shatswell, director of technology at Wheatland High School, began the effort that sent video and audio to airmen in Iraq and Afganhistan as well as South Korea.

"They're going to hear the music playing," Shatswell said of the graduation ceremony. "When they say the names they'll hear."

Scott Brown, systems engineer for wireless network and videostreaming provider VistaNet in Chico, said "You see everybody who graduates."

Capt. Natasha Waggoner at Beale said the school event is "one of those life defining moments" that airmen would miss without the webcast.

"For them to provide this is great," Waggoner said of Wheatland High. "Deployments are hard. It's things like this that make them easier."

Shatswell, 40, who started working with computers as an 8-year-old in 1976, is still dazzled that technology allows military stationed overseas to see what happens in Wheatland.

Along with the airmen watching their children graduate, families of two foreign exchange students from Germany and the Netherlands who will graduate from Wheatland High are expected to watch the event on the live webcast.

Counselor Agles, who began teaching at Wheatland in 1969 and has been to almost every graduation since, said student enrollment rises and falls at the school to match activity at the military base.

The number of students peaked at 994 during the height of the Vietnam War in the 1970s, she recalled.

Graduation Friday involved about 125 students in the senior class, she said.

Technology that allows a webcast of a high school graduation to be seen by military parents stationed around the world would once have been thought impossible, Agles said.

"I went to high school and used a slide rule," she said. "We didn't even have pocket calculators."