Graduation is a time of celebration — a time when teenagers close their youthful chapter in life and eagerly look ahead to their bright futures.
It is supposed to be when families, friends and loved ones come together to honor the hard work and dedication it took to finish what was started more than a decade earlier.
It makes our hearts sink to think that gathering will not happen as it traditionally does this year because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
We commend the Hart County Charter System for ensuring that a ceremony will happen when crowds can gather once more, but as the number of cases continue to grow statewide and shelter-in-place orders are being extended around the country, there is no way to know when that might be.
Senior year is when lifelong memories are made and when our community’s young people begin their transition into adulthood. Prom, which has also been postponed indefinitely, senior awards night and other rites of passage high schoolers look forward to will not happen for the class of 2020 as they have for all other classes before them.
For that reason, we aren’t touching our annual tradition at The Sun of honoring local graduates as we always have in our special graduation section. It is scheduled to publish the week the ceremony was planned and it will stay that way so we can show members of the Class of 2020 how much they mean to us.
We encourage the community to join us in this endeavor. To make this year’s edition special, we are offering a special discounted rate for all advertising. This provides parents, grandparents, friends and businesses a great opportunity to send a special message of love and congratulations to show this class that although their senior year did not end anywhere close to how they wanted it to, we still are proud of their accomplishment.
We also are asking seniors to send us their Senior Shoutouts to editor@thehartwellsun.com. These shoutouts can be no more than 20 words in length and are an opportunity to send a shoutout to friends or family who were there for you during your scholastic career here in Hart County. Think of it as signing a yearbook, which also isn’t likely to happen in the traditional fashion this year. Only instead of a yearbook, it is there for all of The Hartwell Sun readers to see, so make them count seniors.
Help us give the Class of 2020 a sendoff to remember.