Web helps reunions both virtual and real

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Mary Ann Martinez is development director at Marian Central High School in Woodstock. (Travis Haughton – thaughton@nwherald.com)

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Kelly Landers helped plan her 10-year high school class reunion from hundreds of miles away.

Social media such as Facebook and Twitter are helping classmates stay in touch, and if not, find each other again when reunion time rolls around.

Landers’ brother graduated from Marian Central Catholic High School in Woodstock a year before she did, and his class didn’t have a reunion, she said.

She didn’t want to be in the same boat, so Landers, who is the superintendent’s daughter, took the lead. Now living in Virginia about 40 miles from Washington, D.C., she recruited some friends who still lived in the area.

A Facebook page was created for the September reunion and then mirrored on MySpace, Landers said.

“It helped in feeling like I was still a part of the local community, at least in an online sense,” she said. “I don’t think we would have nearly as many people show up [if we didn’t have Facebook]. It’s definitely a good tool.”

Landers had an advantage in that she attended a private school with a department that handles alumni relations; many public schools don’t. She was able to get the most current mailing list, although many of the addresses were parents’ homes from when they graduated.

Mary Ann Martinez, Marian’s development director and an alumna herself, said the school has about six reunions a year. As a private school, Marian must keep in touch with its alumni for several reasons, including sending their children to their alma mater and private donations to help fund the school.

Martinez began working at the school in the early 1990s and has seen the digital push.

“I don’t know that it increases participation, but I do know that it has streamlined their ability to contact classmates, and it has definitely saved on costs,” she said.

Almost 500 people have joined the school’s alumni page on Facebook, which encourages alumni to get involved and lets them know about upcoming events. But at the same time, Martinez said she doesn’t want to flood their message inboxes or constantly badger them with updates.

“We would be unfriended very quickly,” Martinez said, admitting that the site is somewhat new to her. “I said that right, didn’t I?”

Karen Kathamegos, a graduate of Jacobs High School whose maiden name is Wiese, recently helped plan her 25-year reunion with the help of Facebook, www.classmates.com and ZabaSearch.

“It’s like you’re on that computer 24-7,” she said. Like Landers, she networked with people still living in the area; she is in northern Wisconsin and out of town for about three days a week working as a flight attendant.

“I would call people, and they would be like, ‘How did you find me?’” Kathamegos said.

But if their lives are on the Internet with “status updates” on everything including what they ate for breakfast, is it easy to run out of things to talk about?

Landers said she thought it helped to know a bit about her classmates post-high school.

“I knew people had gotten married or had kids and it was nice to have a conversation about it instead of reading the status updates,” Landers said.

Landers said she thought that communication for reunions would be completely done online someday. For one thing, it reduces costs to both the organizers and attendees, she said.

The price tag for attending her reunion started at $25 and might have been lowered if the costs of sending out invites had been reduced, Landers said.

“I think a lot of people don’t realize how expensive it is to print out 150 color, double-sided copies,” she said. “It was about $300 just to print and mail all the invitations.”

Afterward, some people posted pictures from the reunion on Facebook, Landers said.

“I imagine that people will continue to keep in touch that way,” she said. “Maybe if we have a reunion in the future or people are in from out of town, they can get in contact that way.”

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