When preparing for a school graduation, there is typically excitement, joy and a bit of nerves.
The ceremony, however, doesn’t usually come with a warning that you aren’t in fact, seeing double, as the students head to the stage for their diploma.
But when Vernon Hills High School in Illinois held its 2023 graduation ceremony, there was reason for the audience to question their vision.
The school was saying goodbye to 12 sets of twins and one set of triplets!
According to the high school, the twins and triplets made up nearly 8% of the school’s graduating class, which was made up of 377 students.
The graduating twins and their principal, center. Photo from YouTube
“We knew we had a lot of twins, but it wasn’t until our yearbook put a little section together, and these guys got their yearbooks a couple weeks ago, and we realized at that point that we had a lot of twins in the building,” principal Jon Guillaume said on the ‘Today’ show.
Interestingly, the principal said he also had a twin sister. “I think the neat thing about twins, in general, is they can celebrate their uniqueness in one another while also having this special bond and special camaraderie,” Guillaume said.
I know what they go through on a daily basis,” he said. “We have a special connection.”
Guillaume said that oftentimes twins will follow each other after high school, finding comfort in staying together during college. For Heath and Hunter Field, they happen to agree. The pair will be roommates at Illinois Wesleyan University.
Heath and Hunter Field. Photo by WGN News/YouTube
“I think having a twin your first year, knowing someone on your first day of school and living with them for the first year, kind of gives you that safety net and confidence to make new friends and kind of enjoy this new chapter of life,” Heath said.
But Guillaume noted that sometimes twins will use this moment to start forging their own path, which he noted several of the twins were doing. “I think they realize at some point there’s going to be this little divergence and oftentimes, the end of high school is when that is,” he said.
The Irvin triplets said they were ready to find what the future held for them, on their own. Each sibling will be going to a different school.
The Irvin Triplets. Photo by WGN News/YouTube
“It was just unique to see all of us have the same journey of applying to colleges but all going to different colleges in the end,” Olivia Irvin said. “I think the only difference is next year there will be a lot more FaceTime calls instead of text messages throughout the day to one another.”
For David and Jacob Wang, they knew that they would go to the same school, the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Both have different majors, however (David in Computer Science, Jacob in Engineering), and will not be rooming together.
David and Jacob Wang. Photo by WGN News/YouTube
We decided not to room together because we want to meet new people, but we’ll always be close,” David said.
“In elementary school, one of our teachers could tell us apart and the other one couldn’t,” he said. “So the teacher that could tell us apart would plan it out and send us to the wrong classroom a period after just to play jokes on her coworker.”
Laughing, Jacob said, “I don’t know if that flies in college.”
Funny enough, this isn’t the most set of graduating twins from a high school. Illinois seems to have a penchant for this. New Trier High School in Winnetka, Ill., holds the current world record – 44 sets of twins graduated in 2018, according to ‘Today’.
Watch the entertaining, double-vision worthy, interview below.
