Windsor high school students get full grad experience after successful petition

Grade 12 students at Avon View High School in Windsor, N.S., graduated as a full class on Wednesday — after successfully convincing their school to drop the COVID-19 protocols that would have had them graduating in smaller groups.

The school's administration initially said the graduation ceremony would be broken into four groups of about 50 students each, despite there being no provincial gathering limits in place.

Many of the students didn't like that idea so they started a petition calling on the school to let them have a normal grad ceremony, like many other high schools are doing this year.

"I feel really proud of us students for speaking out the way that we did and I feel like if we didn't make such a commotion about this, then we wouldn't have gotten to experience what we did today," Joy Bannerman told CBC Radio's Mainstreet after graduation on Wednesday.

Bannerman said she's thankful to the students who were willing to speak out and to the school's administration for listening.

Chad Cochrane, who started the petition, said there were about 1,000 people at the graduation. He said he's proud of what the students accomplished.

"It made today more even more special than it would have been by just looking out there and seeing all the faces and just realizing that it would have been at a quarter capacity," he said.

To hear more about their graduation and their efforts to have it together, listen to Mainstreet guest host Carolyn Ray's full interview with the students below.