For high-school graduates, the pandemic has meant no dinner-dances and no receiving diplomas in front of the entire graduating class for the second straight year.
But Victoria High School student Annika Clark has done her best to keep her chin up. “It’s really hard and I struggled with it, but I still focus on what we are able to do,” Clark said. “We’re so lucky that we’re all able to be in school together.”
Still, her last year in high school is nothing like what she expected.
“This year has definitely been very different than I imagined my grad year would look like,” Clark said. “We definitely have been thrown some curve balls, but I think the student body and the staff here have done a really great job at trying to handle them.”
At her graduation ceremony, groups of up to 18 students crossed small outdoor stages at the school to receive their diplomas. Each student was allowed two guests.
Clark’s post-ceremony celebration was spent with a group of friends at a dinner hosted by her mother.
“My friends and I all bought these fancy grad dresses,” she said. “It’s kind of like a fake dinner dance at our house.”
Classmate Noah Roth had a simpler notion — hanging out at the beach with a few fellow students for a picnic.
Roth, who plans get a degree in philosophy from the University of Victoria before going to law school, said it has been interesting to see what others in his grad class are looking to do now that high school is over.
“It’s nice to see that everyone seems to have a plan,” he said. “If you don’t think ahead then you’re just randomly guessing all the time.”
Edward Milne Community School in Sooke also held a series of small graduation ceremonies, which Grade 12 student and valedictorian Alyssa Taylor followed up with a family dinner.
Taylor said she steered clear of mentioning COVID-19 in her valedictory speech. “My general message from the speech was be who you want to be,” she said, adding even amid the pandemic, graduation time has been exciting. “You can see all the support from the teachers and your peers and everything, so it’s really quite nice.”
Like Clark, Royal Bay Secondary’s Aasmita Sharma planned a prom-like event with a number of friends at one of their homes, which also came after a scaled-down graduation ceremony with small groups of students.
Sharma was a co-valedictorian with William Shaw — carrying on a school tradition of having two students combine to give a speech to graduates, in this case, a virtual one.
“The main thing from our speech was that there’s been a lot of uncertainty with COVID,” Sharma said. “One of my favourite messages was telling them that it’s OK to not know.
“We don’t know what’s going to happen in a year, or in a week or even tomorrow.”
But “leaping into the unknown,” whether that’s university or something else, is less scary with family and friends supporting you, said Sharma, who is heading to UVic in September to take biochemistry, with an eye on medical school and becoming a neurosurgeon.
She said she’s looking forward to being at a campus that is heading back to normalcy.
Like Roth, Sharma said it has been exciting to hear what her classmates are planning to do, with some moving elsewhere in the province and some leaving the country.
“They’re so smart and there’s so much potential. I can’t wait to be able to say one day that ‘That’s my friend up there. We went to high school together.’ ”
