Class of 2021: What will graduation look like?

The Covid-19 pandemic has made a huge impact on the world and on students’ education. Students have been doing online classes as covid- 19 cases have risen in 2020. Now it is 2021 and students have heard from parents, friends, teachers, and the news about the push for students to begin returning to schools around April. While students are glad students are beginning to return to schools, some may have questioned, “If we are going back to school, how will we graduate this year? Will it be in-person or online?” 

That depends on the amount of people that are dying of covid-19 or getting infected. The article, “The Unequal Toll of the COVID-19 Pandemic” by the CDC states, “Hospital admissions of patients with confirmed COVID-19 decreased 70.4% from the national 7-day average peak of 16,540 admissions on January 9, 2021, to 4,889 admissions over the week ending March 9, 2021. The average number of daily admissions fell by 11%, compared to the previous week.” This means that covid-19 cases have been decreasing in hospitals, but what does that mean for us, students?

All it means is that we are going back to school soon, but we would most likely have get the vaccine for covid-19 to go back to school.

Besides all that, let’s talk about how we will graduate. We are going to talk about three different ways we could possibly graduate as the ‘Class of 2021.” The three ways we are going to talk about that could be our graduation is online, drive-through, and in-person.

Graduation online is simple, not much to talk about. We will most likely get notified when they will announce that the Class of 2021 is graduating on a Zoom call and they will say all our names and let our name on the screen sit there for a while and then move on to the next person. Then our parents will be told to go pick up the paper that said we graduated. There is not much excitement in that, but that would be the safest choice.

Drive-through graduation is also simple, but a bit less depressing than graduating online. We would go to the school with our cars and teachers and other staff members will be there celebrating for us, with masks of course. Even though covid-19 cases have been declining, we still have to be safe. We have to wear masks with the family members driving us because we also have to be safe. We would drive up and receive graduation gifts from the principal or a teacher. It’s possible that we will be given a small bag of candy, but the school might not since they want to be safe with everything. This would be safer for all of us as we wouldn’t have to get out of the car and we would all keep our distance.

Graduation in-person is not simple at all, but it would be nice to see all your friends, teachers, and everyone in person again after dealing with this pandemic for a year. Everyone would be wearing masks and have their graduation clothing on. You would be sitting or standing with other students with a distance in-between to be safe. Everyone would be wearing masks, they would check our temperatures to make sure we don’t have a fever and give us hand sanitizer so our hands are clean. They would make sure everything is safe for everyone and there is nothing to worry about. Of course, this would be celebrated differently than before the pandemic, but it would still have some things similar to the original graduation ceremony. This is the riskiest option, but if our school takes the best precautions, it could be made as safe as possible for all of us.

I hope this helps you know how we might graduate this year as the ‘Class of 2021.” Even if what finally gets selected is not your preferred graduation ceremony out of the three possibilities I mentioned, no matter what we did our best through the hardest time. Our hard work would pay off and I hope we get the best graduation we can.