COVID 19 Pandemic restrictions have affected many aspects of our culture.
More so for graduating 2020 graduates at all levels of education.
The Uniontown High School Class of 2020 is having their graduation ceremony this weekend, a full two months later than normal.
The event is not something that is open to the general public due to COVID 19 Pandemic crowd number restrictions that Kansas has in place, said Bret Howard, superintendent of USD 235.
“Each graduate will be allowed to invite up to nine people and those people will be allowed into the home bleachers,” Howard said.
“Phase 3 of the governors’ plan still limits the amount of crowd we can allow,” he said. ” In consultation with the Southeast Kansas Multi-County Health Department, we have created this plan and it was approved. We apologize for not being able to accommodate everyone who would want to attend but due to the current circumstances, we are doing the best we can.”
On July 11, seniors and their families will be having an outdoors ceremony on the football field. The event is usually held in the West Bourbon Elementary School gymnasium.
“The tough spot we are in is that to get it approved we had to agree to only have people sit in our home bleachers,” Howard said. “The (running) track (that surrounds the football field) is being worked on as well so we can’t have people all over the football field or even on the track.”
“We will be having our graduates give us a list of up to nine people to sit in the bleachers together,” he said. “If some graduates don’t have nine people then we will give others the option of bringing more.”
“We are going to have people sit on every other row in the bleachers, Howard said. “We have set up seating in the bleachers. There will not be anyone allowed inside the fence or on the field other than graduates and board members.”
“We are planning on live streaming the graduation on our school Facebook page,” he said. ” We have our information technology personnel setting this up right now. Once we know that it will work we will post a link on our website and social media accounts.”
