What do most local graduating high schoolers have in common? These guys (2024)

Thousands of graduation gowns. Hundreds of class rings. Boxes and boxes of “Class of 2024” hoodies, T-shirts and sweatpants.

J.C. Fish and Mark Fredrickson have spent the past few months meeting thousands of Dane County high school seniors face-to-face, personally handing them the colorful celebration gear students will wear as they step on to the graduation stage in coming days.

That includes the caps and gowns that oceans of public high school grads in Madison will be dressed in on June 8, the date they file in and out of the Alliant Energy Center for their back-to-back commencement ceremonies: Vel Phillips Memorial High School graduates at 10 a.m. (in green robes); West High students at 1 p.m. (in blue); East High seniors at 4 p.m. (purple); and La Follette High School graduates at 7 p.m. (maroon).

Almost all of those shimmering outfits come from Midwest Scholastic, the small, independent company Fish and Fredrickson co-own and run out of a Mount Horeb warehouse.

The two men personally deliver all the caps and gowns at every school they serve — including Madison’s four large public high schools plus Shabazz and Capital high schools, along with high schools in Oregon, Verona, Mount Horeb, Stoughton, McFarland, De Forest, Madison’s Edgewood High School and nearly 50 others spread throughout the area.

“We cover about 95 percent of Dane County,” with deliveries starting in mid-February and continuing through May, Fredrickson said. Each $27.99 gown has been custom-ordered by height and weight, and comes with the traditional mortarboard and tassel in school colors. MMSD students order a $15 graduation stole as well.

In Oregon this year, the high school’s 315 seniors ordered their traditional black robes and orange stoles, designed to reflect their school colors, from Midwest Scholastic.

“Every time we meet in October” to begin that year’s graduation orders “it’s like seeing old friends,” Oregon High School principal Jim Pliner said of Fish and Fredrickson.

“They’re community guys,” he said. “They’re invested not only in Mount Horeb, but in Oregon and Madison and all the communities they service.”

Fish and Fredrickson founded Midwest Scholastic in 2016, but they have a much longer history in the business of graduation regalia. For 25 years, Fish worked locally in sales for a much larger, national corporation that also caters to graduates. Fish recruited Fredrickson to join that company after the two men met coaching high school basketball (Fredrickson is still a Mount Horeb junior varsity basketball coach). Their wives also knew each other from teaching; Fredrickson’s wife is a fourth-grade teacher in the district and Fish’s wife, a retired second-grade teacher, still works as a substitute.

The two men eventually grew disillusioned with their former employer when it was bought out by a private equity firm, then was bought and sold several times again. They decided to strike out on their own.

Championship rings

Today the 14-member staff of Midwest Scholastic works out of a warehouse that formerly served as a storage facility for water softener salt. The company covers a territory with about 10,000 high school seniors in all, selling not only clothing but also custom printed graduation announcements, yearbooks, souvenir tassels with a school mascot charm, school award plaques and more.

Janelle Heckendorn, an administrative assistant at East High School who helps organize graduation ceremonies each year, praised Midwest Scholastic’s “dedication to the details and how easy it is to work with them,” including the office staff who handle orders and work behind the scenes. About 50 of East’s 400-some graduates each year re-use robes from other East alumni, friends or neighbors, but the rest purchase new from Midwest Scholastic, she said.

“The service they provide is phenomenal,” Heckendorn said, noting the company goes “above and beyond to meet all of our graduates’ needs.”

Fish and Fredrickson also work with title-winning athletic teams — including seven of the state’s 10 high school champs this year — to design their custom championship rings. Midwest Scholastic also designs many custom senior team rings and championship rings for UW-Madison athletes, as well as for winning teams from UW-La Crosse, UW-Platteville, UW-Oshkosh and more.

The process of designing a lifetime memento with a team is a lot of fun, Fish said. “The athletes are excited.”

A local company

Workers at Midwest Scholastic include some parents of Mount Horeb students, as well as high schoolers themselves who report for their jobs after school.

“Nearly everybody is from our community. We know them, we know their kids, some of them we’ve coached,” Fredrickson said. “So, it’s pretty cool. It’s been a really good situation. We’re a local company, taking on the big guys.”

The company was still young when the COVID-19 pandemic hit in early 2020, forcing schools to cancel in-person commencement ceremonies and stream their celebrations virtually instead. Midwest Scholastic still had to deliver the graduation robes that students had ordered months earlier.

Fish and Fredrickson still remember the cold parking lots across Dane County they stood in that spring, handing out cap-and-gown packets as students and parents drove up and rolled down their car windows. There were too many to hand out for Madison graduates, so instead Midwest Scholastic packed each one up and sent it through the mail.

That kind of emphasis on service has won over clients and helped the company’s rapid growth, Fish said. “Our process is very streamlined, and if you have a question, we’re it.”

“The schools are so busy with everything they’ve got going on,” he said. “They just want somebody who’s going to take care of it, and they don’t want any headaches. I have a working relationship with most of the schools around here, and they trusted me, so it was a fairly easy transition.”

That relationship extends through graduation day. When Madison public high school students gather for pomp and circ*mstance on Saturday, Fish and Fredrickson also will be on-site — all day — with a stock of extra caps and gowns for graduating seniors who show up without one.

“It’s the best day of the year for us,” Fredrickson said. “It varies from community to community and class to class, (but) graduation is still a very big deal, and families really celebrate it. We’re fortunate to have a little hand in that.”