HEMPSTEAD, N.Y. (AP) — A high school in the suburbs of New York City will be seeing double on graduation day this 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 approaches.
“Honestly when we’re together, the room is electric,” said Sydney Monka, as she attended graduation rehearsal with the other twins earlier this 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.”
They’re twins but not identical
Save for the shared last names, though, the pairs may be hard to spot as they walk the stage 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.
“Especially for boy-girl twins, a lot of people think it’s just, like, siblings, but it’s more than that, because we go through the same things at the same time,” she said of her brother, Braydon Cohen, who is headed to the University of Pittsburgh.
Most, when prodded, give a playful shrug at the curious phenomenon in the high school, which is located in an affluent, largely white district about 35 miles (56 kilometers) east of Manhattan.
“I guess there’s just something in the water,” said Emily Brake, who is attending the University of Georgia, echoing a common refrain among the twins.
“We’re all just very lucky. I think it’s just a coincidence,” added her sister, Amanda Brake, who will be attending Ohio State University.
Others acknowledge there’s more than Mother Nature at work.
Arianna Cammareri said her parents had been trying for years to have kids and in vitro fertilization was their last option. Back then, it was more common than it is now for IVF babies to be twins or triplets.
There also may be a genetic component at play.
“There’s a few twins in our family, like I have cousins that are twins, so I guess that raised the chances of having twins,” added the incoming freshman at Stony Brook University, also on Long Island.
Other schools with large sets of twins
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.
Last year, a middle school in suburban Boston had 23 sets of twins in its graduating class, though that’s still far shy of the record for most multiples in the same academic class. New Trier High School in Winnetka, Illinois, had a whopping 44 twin pairs and a set of triplets in 2017, according to Guinness World Records.
After graduation
Most of the twins at Plainview-Old Bethpage are heading off to different colleges.
An exception is Aiden and Chloe Manzo, who will both attend the University of Florida, where they’ll live in the same dormitory on campus and both study business, though with different majors.
“We’re going to see each other a lot,” Chloe said wryly.
“Deep down, my mom knew it would be easier if we went to the same school,” she added. “You know, like moving in, graduation, going to sports games.”
Some were apprehensive about living far from their longtime partner in crime.
Emma and Kayla Leibowitz will be attending Binghamton and Syracuse University, respectively. The fifth generation twins say they’re already making plans for frequent visits even though the upstate New York schools are some 80 miles (130 kilometers) apart.
“I think it’s gonna be really weird because we really do everything together. She’s my best friend. I really can’t do anything without her,” said Emma.
“We’re sleeping over every weekend. I’m coming for football games — like all of it,” said Kayla.
Others were looking forward to getting some breathing room.
Sydney and Kayla Jasser said they’re both studying fashion design — but at different colleges. Sydney is attending the University of Delaware while Kayla will be attending Indiana University.
“We could have went to the same college, but we just wanted to be able to be independent since we’ve been with each other forever,” Kayla said. “It’s good to get out there and have our own experiences.”
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Follow Philip Marcelo on X at twitter.com/philmarcelo.
