With the class of 2020 losing out on the last half of the school year due to COVID-19 and losing the chance to possibly have graduation commencement, grad parties, and pretty much recognition of the last 13 years of their lives, the ADM community didn’t let the COVID-19 pandemic ruin the class of 2020’s recognition. It may look different but it’s still there.

Ashley Reynolds Kuonen was the one who created a special page to recognize and reward the senior class here at ADM, this page is the Adopt A Senior page.  Kuonen said her reasoning for starting it was “Once school was officially canceled for the remainder of the year and I saw people posting about their seniors was when I realized just much the seniors were missing out on.”

Kuonen didn’t come up with this idea on her own. She saw her hometown doing this for their seniors and thought this would be a great way to show ADM seniors that the community cares. She credits the success of the page to the ADM community. Her wishes and hopes for the group were providing a way for members of the ADM community to show support to the seniors. Her biggest hope was “That it brought some joy to the seniors and their parents as they were dealing with all the uncertainty.

The future of the page is currently unknown because she hasn’t thought that far yet, but currently, it’s being used for the seniors to say thank you to their person or family that adopted them.

Her last words were “Congratulations to the ADM senior class of 2020!”

Adopt A Senior Page

The Adopt a Senior page is a group for the ADM community where seniors or their parents can share a spotlight of them and their achievements and also had a spreadsheet with all 126 seniors. Members of the community adopted seniors and provided them gifts, this could have been anonymously or the senior could have known, any senior could have been adopted more than once. Some families adopted more than one senior and showered multiple seniors with gifts and love.

Within three days of the group being created all of the 126 seniors had been adopted. As of now, the seniors are being given gifts ranging from college dorm stuff, stuff for their future careers, essentials like snacks or laundry stuff, and gift cards. Seniors have been encouraged to post their gifts within the page to share what they received.

With 700 group members as of right now, there is no possible way the seniors of the ADM community can say their community hasn’t gathered around and supported them during the troubling time of losing the last part of their senior year.

Opinion:

As a senior, I love this page and everything it’s about. It’s great to see such a caring community come around and provide so much love and support for us seniors.  I am sad that I didn’t get to have a normal end of my senior year. With that being said, if we had a normal senior year ending, we wouldn’t have the adopt a senior page, senior signs all around the ADM communities, or banners being made to celebrate us for our graduation commencement. Just knowing that we’ve been adopted by people to provide us with gifts and shower us with love is amazing it really brings out the smalltown nice of Adel. As the class of 2020 prepares to say goodbye to our beloved ADM, we can know that we had a community that rallied around us when we thought everything was lost and showed us the light in the dark.