A School of New York Celebrates Graduation of 15 Sets of Twins

A high school in the suburbs of New York City saw double on graduation day last weekend: Among the nearly 500 students in its graduating class, 30 are twins.

It’s a tight-knit group. Some of the students at Long Island’s Plainview-Old Bethpage John F. Kennedy High School have known each other since kindergarten, their parents meeting through a local twins club. Some even still plan family vacations together.

These days, some of the twins are on a group text chain, which has helped them cope with their newfound notoriety as graduation day approached.

“Honestly when we’re together, the room is electric,” said Sydney Monka, as she attended graduation rehearsal with the other twins last week. “We’re all very comfortable around each other and we all have these shared experiences so we’re all bouncing off each other. It’s really cool.”

Save for the shared last names, though, the pairs were hard to spot as they walked the stage on Sunday at their high school graduation, held at Hofstra University in Hempstead.

The students are all fraternal twins- meaning born from different eggs and sperm- so none of them are identical. Many of the twins are different genders. That doesn’t make the bonds any less tight, says Bari Cohen, who is attending Indiana University in the fall.

Large cohorts of twins are not unusual at Plainview-Old Bethpage. The high school had back-to-back graduating classes with 10 sets of multiples in 2014 and 2015, and next year’s incoming freshmen class has nine sets of twins, according to school officials.

Among the other schools around the country with big sets of graduating twins are Clovis North High School in Fresno, California, with 14 pairs, and Eleanor Roosevelt High School in Greenbelt, Maryland, with 10 pairs.