A tribute to a ‘new normal’: Beaufort and Jasper’s tenacious, resilient Class of 2020

To the Class of 2020:

Yours has been a graduation like no other.

No one now alive has been through what the coronavirus pandemic put you through.

The last time something like this happened? 1918. America was at war in Europe and battling the Spanish flu at home.

Now, COVID-19 has separated you from the friends you’ve known for 12 years, robbed you of the sweet pleasures of saying goodbye as a group and remembering and sharing, all of you together, how you hope to remake the world.

You’ve still stood in lines to receive your diplomas. Only this year, there was no sitting in a crowd in the blazing sun in a cap and gown, then following classmates to the stage as you heard your name called over a fickle stadium loudspeaker.

Instead, this year you might have been in a Toyota Camry, followed by a Ram 1500. Number 10 in the class might have been waving from the back of her father’s tow truck with her visage emblazoned on a banner attached to the front bumper.

The school superintendent and waving community politicians literally went by in a roadside blur.

But you refused to be defeated — not by illness or a loss of tradition. Said Battery Creek High School’s Jeandre Hopkins: “We will be remembered for how we pulled through and how we made a way.”

You made traditions of your own.

Before you received your drive-through diplomas in parade fashion, you taped segments of a more “normal” graduation ceremony. You wore the graduation regalia, heard your names called. Your principals and guidance counselors greeted you, a few at a time, on the stage. You teachers were there to cheer you on and smile — behind face masks.

Your parents were allowed to be intimate spectators, taking as many pictures as necessary to capture your moment.

Valedictorians and salutatorians and class presidents still made their speeches — videotaped earlier, then woven seamlessly into a final film released at the time the big graduation ceremony was supposed to have occurred.

In her speech, Kayla Anfinson of May River High School thanked the community for stepping up to make seniors’ final weeks of high school special. School administrators placed signs in their yards. Restaurants held special senior nights. There were parades and small gatherings to honor accomplishments. “We live in a community that is so caring,” she said. “The amount of support has been overwhelming.”

Lawren Caldwell, valedictorian of Whale Branch Early College High School, mentioned classmates who persevered through their final year of high school after family members died. She appreciated teachers who brought food for students who didn’t have any at home.

Determination. Resiliency. Those traits define the class of 2020, the speakers said. As Ethan Helms, Bluffton High School’s valedictorian, put it: “Life is made up of an assortment of adversities, with just enough fond memories in between to make everything worthwhile.”

No one needs to tell this class that a word like “normal” has to be given quotation marks now. Because what you’ve lived through in the past three months is anything but that.

Your school year began with typical promise and hope, along with a lot of bad puns about “vision” for 2020.

It ended in a way nobody saw coming.

Or maybe you did.

An unusually unstable world

“We were told we were the kids who were going to change the world,” said Riley Hay, Hilton Head High School’s valedictorian.

You are among the first post-9/11 babies, born into a world that was already unusually unstable.

When you started kindergarten, there were wars in Iraq and, soon, in Afghanistan.

By middle school, you’d seen the economy collapse, only to slowly rebuild itself around words such as “stimulus” and “bailout.”

You went from flipping water bottles and throwing water balloons to evacuating for hurricanes every fall of high school. Tyler Kidd, Battery Creek High School’s valedictorian, suggested that this class would be “the most adaptable class ever to graduate.”

The fact that you lost your last three months in school together may not have been a real shock, considering the world you’d always lived in.

Yet it was.

The kind of shock that saw handshakes and hugs quickly replaced by elbow bumps and friendly nods from a distance.

The novel virus that sprang up across the globe ended any notions of a prom or a senior trip or one final soccer season under the lights or anything else the Class of 2020 had earned for its long, hard work.

Those elbow bumps became that much more important to those who had to remember to wash their hands longer and more often and to keep six feet away from the friends they’d known since first grade.

You were torn from the academic structures of school, learned to learn in a different way, shifting from in-classroom to online. For some of you, that also meant working extra hours at jobs that were suddenly deemed essential and coming home at night to play a video that a math teacher created hours earlier explaining exponential functions.

Some of your parents were also deemed essential workers. That meant you had to become the parents, some of you tasked with watching younger siblings while trying to complete your assignments with nothing but self-motivation and willpower.

Forget the stress of unseen particles floating through the atmosphere and that curious cough that isn’t getting better. Many of you were still stressed over GPAs and college admissions standards.

So, Class of 2020 — let us tell you this: there are fully functioning adults who couldn’t have handled the disappointments and changes that you have with such grace.

When you teachers admirably adapted to a changing environment, you met them with courage in the place everyone now calls “the new normal.”

And you met them there ready to work.

Adversity honed “our ability to work in the midst of chaos,” said Hay, of Hilton Head High School.

Respect earned through hard work

Saying “I’m Class of 2020” might not get you cuts in line at the DMV or a lower interest rate on your someday mortgage.

But it will definitely get you much more than a modicum of respect.

The rest of us know what you’ve missed out on.

We know this isn’t what you envisioned.

But you met every challenge, head-on and determined to not only survive but to prevail.

Most high school reunions feature groups of people who sit around tables with music playing in the background that seems softer and easier on the ears with each advancing year.

They reminisce about “the day we flushed the cherry bomb down the toilet on G Hall” or “the impossible standards in Mrs. Henderson’s English class.”

What they won’t talk about is “that time senior year when all hell broke loose in the world and we had to finish school at home.”

That experience is solely yours, and your reaction to it makes you special.

Know that the rest of us already understand that life isn’t fair. We know it has been especially unfair to you.

But we welcome you to the wider world, knowing you’re already equipped for whatever comes next.

We’re cheering for you, thinking of you, and, most of all, counting on you and your resiliency to show the rest of us the way forward.

“We haven’t just been learning science and social studies,” said Kidd, of Battery Creek. “We’re evolving into a generation of young adults ready to take over the world.”

You’ve already proved that.

This story was originally published June 5, 2020 at 5:30 AM.