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2020: A Class Dismissed – Mason Parks

April 23, 2020

Mason Parks, a fifth-year senior at North Yarmouth Academy, discusses how the coronavirus has impacted a Maine school with students from Florida to Canada.

A photo of an empty classroom with overlayed text reading 2020: A class dismissed.

Born in the weeks and months after 9/11, and graduated in the year of a crippling pandemic, the Class of 2020 lived through some of the most profound change ever witnessed. These young adults missed out on cornerstone experiences that ease the transition from being a child to being an adult. We captured the stories of a class prematurely dismissed.

This video is part of the 2020: A Class Dismissed series. The Maine Monitor is speaking to seniors from as many Maine high schools as possible to tell the story of Maine’s Class of 2020 and how these soon-to-be graduates are dealing with the unexpected developments that come with a pandemic and a disrupted senior year. This video with Mason Parks was recorded on March 26.

Mason was interviewed on March 26, 2020. On that day, these were the top news stories in Maine:

Department of Labor sees over 20,000 unemployment claims in Maine, up from 634 last week (From Lori Valigra of the Bangor Daily News)
Maine CDC: 155 coronavirus cases in 11 Maine counties, including Franklin (By Christopher Burns of the Bangor Daily News)
Maine’s testing backlog grows amid national shortage of key chemicals (By Kevin Miller and Eric Russell of the Portland Press Herald)
Colby College in Waterville reports 5 cases of coronavirus (From Scott Monroe of the Kennebec Journal)
Inside Maine’s largest prison, inmates watch coronavirus inch closer with sense of ‘pending doom’ (By Callie Ferguson of the Bangor Daily News)

To view more of the day’s headlines, browse our collection of the state’s best coronavirus coverage.

Check out our interactive data dashboard to explore trends in Maine’s COVID-19 cases by county, age, sex of the afflicted individuals and more in charts updated daily with data from Maine’s CDC.

Bailey Beltramo

Bailey Beltramo is an emerging photographer who grew up in Canterbury, New Hampshire. He graduated with a degree in communications from Norwich University in 2017, and continued his education through the Professional Intensive program at the Rocky Mountain School of Photography. Both his photo and film work are pursued through a documentary approach and focus on capturing human experience in outdoor environments. His published work has spanned a range of settings from life on a dude ranch in Wyoming to the lessons of a non-profit, nature-based school in New Hampshire.