WINOOSKI – After Governor Phil Scott announced that Vermont’s schools would remain closed for the remainder of the school year, there was a sense of grief among the students, especially high school seniors who would no longer get to enjoy many of the rituals that come with their passing on into adulthood, most notably graduation ceremonies. This year, graduations will be canceled, put online, or, at best, severely delayed and scaled back, and students were feeling a profound sense of loss. That is, they were until everyone over 35 started posting their senior pictures on Facebook.

“I can’t describe it,” says Winooski High School senior Sara Kastic. “Just seeing all those old picture of my parents and their friends made all the bad feelings go away. Who doesn’t want embarrassing pictures of their parents posted all over the internet when they are in high school? This really fixed everything.”

Seniors across the state agreed that the best way to cheer them up would be for adults to constantly remind them of the fact that they are not going to get a graduation ceremony by posting tons of pictures of themselves at their own graduation ceremonies. “When you can’t do something you were really looking forward to,” Kastic noted, “one of the best ways to get through it is for literally millions of other people to tell you about how they got to do that thing, and how great it was for them. It’s really taking our minds off the whole situation.”

When asked how they felt about the support shown on Facebook, another high school senior asked “What’s Facebook? Is that like TikTok for grandparents?”

With the success of this initiative, there is now also a movement to help everyone in the state who has recently been laid off by sending them pictures of job offers and pdfs of salary increase paperwork from people who are still employed.