CHOCOWINITY — Southside High School held its third annual Alumni Day last Friday, but it marked the first year the event was school-wide.

Tina Petty, a math teacher at Southside who started Alumni Day, said the idea of bringing back Southside alumni to talk with students came to her about three years ago. That year, she asked a few of her former students to come in and speak to her math classes.

“They don’t believe us,” she said of telling her students about college life. “It’s more real to them when the kids come.”

Alumni Day’s second year saw the event grow to include all of the honors classes at Southside, which eventually led to this year’s school-wide event.

To make Friday’s Alumni Day happen, Petty said she reached out to former students via Facebook and asked her students to contact their friends, as well. She said about 26 alumni, ranging from four-year university students to community college attendees to military members, signed on to participate.

“This year we’ve done the entire school,” Petty said. “I saw how successful it was with my kids and how much they learned.”

Petty created 14 groups made up of two homerooms each, grouped based on grade level, and assigned four alumni to visit them. Providing a question-and-answer sheet to each alumnus helped prepare, the college students then visited each group in pairs, switching rooms to accommodate the next pair of alumni, she said.

Petty said she did her best to pair alumni attending four-year colleges with those attending community colleges in an effort to show the Southside students what options they may have after graduation.

“I had all alumni fill out a sheet. … I’m going to put together a Google doc and I’m going to share it with every student,” she said.

Marlin Edwards, 20, a junior at Pitt Community College, said this was her second year coming back for Alumni Day.

She said she still has a younger sister at Southside, so she thinks it’s important for those students to hear what college is like.

“They might listen to what we say,” Edwards said.

Phil Smith, 18, a freshman at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, said he used the question-and-answer sheet to start conversations with the high school students.

Despite a few awkward questions being asked by the students, he said Alumni Day went well overall.

Petty said she wants to continue Alumni Day as a school-wide event from now on, and she hopes to add more community college attendees to the mix next year.

“We’re about as big as we can get,” she said. “It really does wake them up to what college is about.”