PENHOLD – It has been a long wait, but the date to officially honour the 2020 graduating class of Penhold Crossing Secondary School has finally been set.
There will be a cap and gown graduation ceremony for the town’s proudest young Penholders inside the gym at the Penhold Regional Multiplex at 2 p.m. on Sept. 26.
Scott MacDonald, principal at Penhold Crossing, said while the 30 graduating students and their families were disappointed in not having the traditional grad ceremony back in late spring, as is the custom, the late date is a situation in today’s COVID-19 pandemic world they have come to accept.
“We talked about this a little bit in the spring that this is what we could do. They knew what the plan was. This would be kind of our worst case scenario, and they all had time to think about it,” said MacDonald.
Although the late spring ceremony was scrapped, the Town of Penhold did honour graduates on June 1 with a row of special signs in front of the multiplex. There was also a special grad video made for social media.
However, Penhold graduates will now join scores of others across the region who already had a revised COVID-era traditional ceremony. Next month on Oct. 24, the 2020 graduates from Bowden Grandview will be the last.
MacDonald said Penhold’s long awaited ceremony will be an “in-person” grad with each student allowed to have two guests. He said each student and guest cluster would be appropriately social distanced, about 12 feet apart throughout the gym. He said about 25 out of the 30 graduates are expected to attend, with the ceremony lasting less than an hour.
“We have a couple of grads that can’t attend because they are going to be elsewhere at school or university, and we have a couple who just don’t want to come,” he said. “Normally we would have had about 30 there, so we are going to have slightly less. I think they are just relieved to have something.”
