Hopeful tone

The Class of 2020 left during March of its senior year and never returned.

While the Class of 2021 was in its classrooms for its senior year, not much was completely back to normal.

The second Jay County High School class deeply impacted by the ongoing coronavirus pandemic said goodbye Sunday during its commencement ceremony.

“After this long, unprecedented year, we can finally say that we graduated high school,” said senior class president Eliza Bader during her opening remarks. “At the start of high school, who would have ever thought that we’d be graduating during a pandemic?”

When the pandemic hit in the United States in March 2020, students finished the remainder of the school year virtually.

Jay School Corporation returned to in-person classes this year, but mask wearing was required in most situations. Attendance was limited at athletic competitions and other events.

Activities were modified or canceled in order to help prevent the spread of COVID-19.

When cases of the disease spiked in the late fall and early winter, Jay Schools twice shifted the junior-senior high school to virtual learning for a week. (Weekly two-hour delays on Wednesdays were implemented to give staff time to catch up.)

Sunday’s graduation ceremony — it was held about two weeks later than usual because Jay Schools delayed the start of classes this year to allow more time for staff to prepare — returned to the traditional site of the school’s main gym this year after the 2020 edition was held in outdoors in drive-in style. Original plans for this year were to hold the ceremony outdoors at Harold E. Schutz Memorial Stadium, but the event was moved indoors as new cases of COVID-19 have declined steeply in the last month.

While the pandemic loomed large over the Class of 2021’s last year-plus of high school, Griffin Mann told his classmates he’d prefer they not be remembered for the disease that turned the world upside down but for all that they will accomplish in the years to come.

“I want us to be the class in the generation that changed the world, the class that brought about peace in our ever-so-divided country,” he said. “I want us to be the class that was successful, and I don’t mean at becoming rich, but rather being successful at living life the way we want to and fulfilling our wildest dreams and aspirations.”

Leah Hummel struck a similarly hopeful message in her commencement address. She likened graduation to the completion of act one of a play, with act two yet unscripted and full of possibility.

“As we step in our own directions, we’ve been given the opportunity to write the stories of our own lives,” Hummel said. “We just have to have the courage to pick up the pen and start writing that story, because it’s a story only we can write.”