Five years after COVID, Sarah Mills still pondering life's mysteries
Sarah Mills looks back at the COVID pandemic and some of the questions she asked herself to stave off boredom. Mills say...
The graduating class of 2021 is ready to wave goodbye to plenty of terms that were unfamiliar less than two years ago.
Quints, cohorts, remote learning and staggered start times didn’t mean much to students and parents in the fall of 2019, but during the pandemic, those words were part of the routine.
Tommy Douglas Collegiate held its outdoor graduation ceremony Wednesday. Groups of students arrived at assigned time slots, giving opportunities for family members to watch and take pictures all while keeping the number of people present low.
Twins Erika and Avery Stronski wondered for months what their graduation would actually look like without any certainty.
“It’s crazy. It feels surreal to finally be here after four years,” Avery said.
“There’s been a lot of excitement leading up to it. We’re just glad we could actually be here as opposed to a Zoom meeting,” Erika added.
The pair graduated with honours and Erika served as the class valedictorian.
An outdoor and distanced graduation with limited people was the final event of a challenging school year, principal Dave Fisher said, wishing the students could have had the typical senior experience.
“The life of the school is what high school is all about, and not having all the opportunity that students have had in the past, that was probably the biggest challenge,” Fisher said.
“That connection was missed, but our students learned to be resilient, flexible and to adapt. Those are all great life skills that they can take forward.”
The Strosnki twins were able to make the best of a bad situation.
“It has been kind of hard not doing sports and other extracurriculars, but we’ve gone with it. The school has done well with the quint system,” Avery said.
“We did the best with what we got and that’s all you can say about that,” Erika said.
Their mom, Andrea Stronski, doesn’t feel a COVID-19 school year robbed her children of any social aspect or quality education. In fact, she thinks they may have benefitted.
“I think it was a little bit better and I think it prepared them better for university. They were able to get used to self-discipline learning,” she said.
Happy not to watch the cap and gown ceremony on her laptop, Andrea said Wednesday and the weeks leading up to it were filled with nothing but anxious and exciting moments.
“Let’s make this as fun as we can and celebrate all the things we may have missed out on over the last year,” she said.
