On April 9th, Missouri Governor Mike Parsons announced the closure of all Missouri Schools through the rest of the school year due to COVID-19, suspending any upcoming events, such as prom.

For Fair Grove High School and many others, prom has been a tradition for a countless amount of years. The dance is a way to celebrate the end of the academic year and spend time with friends you grew up with. But in the case for most juniors and seniors this year, that opportunity has been robbed from them.

Seniors endure the worst during this time, their last days of high school coming as a surprise, given no time to say goodbye to people they’ve come to know the best. They may have just lost the chance to attend their final prom, and their own graduation. A whole four years of high school, down the drain, and nobody saw it coming.

Fair Grove High School and it’s faculty have not confirmed any plans yet, leaving the issue’s fate up for debate. Will Fair Grove have it’s 2020 prom?

Of course, we can all hope that is the case, for the sake of our seniors and anyone else who had plans of attending. The most likely outcome for the matter would be waiting until the Coronavirus pandemic has reached an end and the next school year has begun. However, will this really save some seniors from missing out? There is no certain time estimated for when this situation will finally blow over, so how can we be sure that no students are states away attending college when the time comes?

To be frank, we can’t. Not every former Fair Grove Student has plans of staying in Missouri after high school, so is that just how the cookie crumbles?

As a run down: idealistically, every student wanting to attend prom should be able without conflict or a long expensive drive back home. Prom can’t be hosted any time soon, as it would be tough to dance with your date at a distance of 6 ft apart, and hosting prom through a video chat/group call isn’t much of an option.

One solution would be holding out until the Winter break of the next school year, or for the purposes of irony, Spring break. This solution doesn’t eliminate every complication, but it limits enough that having a prom isn’t entirely out of the question. Holding it during either of these times would allow for more time to pass, which hopefully means COVID-19 will be a thing of the past at that time. Students already coming back home to see family during the holiday won’t have to worry about an extra long drive just to go to prom and back. This does still mean some students will miss out if there isn’t a way back to Missouri for them, but ensuring every student’s attendance is nearly impossible.

No student deserves to have this taken from them after all the hard work they have put in over the course of their high school years. However the school’s staff decides to handle the many situations at hand, we can hope that prom will be saved. Let’s all hope that the theme isn’t a required medical masquerade.