In just a week, more than 160 Park City High School seniors have been adopted. As KPCW’s Leslie Thatcher explains – they haven’t been given up by their families – rather they’re being showered with good wishes from a caring community.
Being part of the Class of 2020 has been tough. What was the promising start of a new decade for seniors, and new adventures as high school graduates, has instead meant - because of the COVID-19 pandemic - no senior prom, no senior ditch day and no pomp and circumstance…
Once again, the Park City community has stepped up and a Facebook page – Adopt a Park city Senior 2020 – was created. One of the administrators of the page Lori Hampton says she was just filling a need…
“We just wanted to do something special,” Hampton said. “We also run the Ask Park City Facebook group and there was lots of talks going on about wanting to do something for the seniors, so we just put our minds together and decided to start the group so we could have them get adopted and just feel special in this time.”
The idea is simple…those adopting a senior are asked to send the senior an uplifting note, a gift card - or even fulfill something on their online wish list. Gifts she says however are not necessary.
But she encourages seniors to create a wish list on Amazon and that list can be sent to people without having to give away the senior’s personal information. You can learn how to make that list on the pinned post at the top of the Facebook adoption page.
With a class of more than 400 seniors, Hampton says in a week, they’ve almost hit the halfway mark…
“Our effort is to try and make sure that every senior gets adopted one way or another,” she said. “If they have friends that can put them on there, or just people who know them just want to go out and adopt them and not even necessarily have to be on there. We just want to make sure that every single senior gets the love.”
To participate, search the Facebook group, Adopt a Park City Senior 2020, and add a senior with a note at the top saying, Not Adopted.
“So, what they do is the parents or grandparents or friends or whatever, they will go on there and post a photo or a whole bunch of photos,” Hampton explained. “We have some people posting from when they’re a baby all the way up to their senior photos and they just explain a little bit about their senior and what their interests are and what they plan on doing after graduation and then, it pretty much is immediate. As soon as people post on there, we have had people get adopted within the same minute that they’ve posted.”
You can search the group for not adopted but she says, so far, seniors are snapped up as soon as they’re posted online.
She says as administrators, they search the profiles of those who are adopting seniors to make sure they’re legitimate. It’s up to the senior to decide whether to share their personal information.
