Bishop Dunn Memorial School celebrated their 2020 class of 8th grade graduates last Wednesday morning.

“We’ve been preparing for weeks,” said Nancy Benfer, principal of the Bishop Dunn Memorial School. “We have had two different versions of our ceremony. They’re doing our drive by pickup which we had to do a lot of work on social distancing to make sure we’re following guidelines.”

The school also had a virtual ceremony with a slide show presentation.
Benfer said the school was prepared for the school’s shutdown. “My staff was ready to go,” said Benfer. “We already use technology in the classrooms. We use Google classrooms. We were already set up. We didn’t miss a beat.”

Benfer thinks that the change in graduation procedure was a bit more disappointing for parents.

“As long as they [8th graders] can still get together and do things like this [the drive-in graduation], they were well prepared,” said Benfer.
Bishop Dunn is physically closed to everyone who isn’t staff for the rest of the year. The school does mandatory health screenings and temperature checks, and only has limited staff in the building.
The school is preparing to physically reopen to the public in September. The school will still be offering online learning regardless of a physical reopening.

“It’s so sad,” said Benfer. “It’s the melancholy of that feeling, we lost all that time together. I was able to have contact with the students everyday by doing the principal’s page on Google. They did our morning announcements. We can email back and forth very quickly, but it’s not the same as them sitting in my office and visiting with me.”