5 years after COVID-19 led to school closures, Islanders reflect on the lessons learned [Video]

Unlike most high school valedictorians, Brandon MacKinnon gave his graduation speech 11 times.

Each time, there was a different group of Charlottetown Rural High School students and parents in the audience. 

When he graduated in 2021, public health measures designed to slow the spread of COVID-19 divided MacKinnon’s graduating class into 11 groups — each with its own graduation ceremony to ensure the gatherings were small enough to meet provincial guidelines. 

MacKinnon said he had the option to record his speech as a video that could be shown at each ceremony. But he opted to deliver it in-person, so that each of his classmates could see it live. 

“Since so much had changed the past year and a half… [I thought] it would be nice for at least my graduating class and myself to have, like, a level of normalcy,” he said in an interview this month. “We didn’t really get a …