The Class Of 2020 Copes With Covid-19 While Trying To Focus On Their Future

By Allison Donahue, Michigan Advance

Looking back on your years in high school, you might remember prom night, or graduation or the day your class pulled off its senior prank. For the class of 2020, the big moments were put on pause, or in some cases canceled, while COVID-19 brought the entire world to a halt.

The disease has affected every person’s life in one way or another, but for this year’s seniors, the disappointments are particularly sharp as the school year draws to an anti-climatic close.

Without even knowing it at the time, seniors left their high school for the last time in March.

Now, as they live through a world where the big moments are celebrated through Zoom calls and Snapchat stories, they prepare for the next step.

Below are the stories of five Michigan high school seniors from across the state who are living through unprecedented times and preparing to start anew in a world on the brink of unknown challenges and changes.

Cristiana Rosa — Dakota High School, Macomb Township

Cristiana Rosa was supposed to be on stage last month for her school’s production of “Alice in Wonderland.”

However, like most school events, the play was canceled.

Performing was a big part of Rosa’s experience in her metro Detroit high school, and she said to end her senior year this way was “devastating.”

“Honestly, it was so hard just because it was my senior year,” Rosa said. “It would have been my last show at a school that I’ve been performing at since I was in eighth grade. So it was really emotional. Even now, I still get a little bit upset.”

But for Rosa, having her last year in high school get cut short goes beyond the theater program.

“Although I loved performing, and that’s really where my home was, I’m still really sentimental towards the senior traditions I’m missing out on,” she said.

Awards night, graduation and prom were some of the major events that she was excited for all throughout high school, but she said she is thankful for the teachers and administrators who are trying to make life still feel “normal.”

“The administrative team, the teachers and all of the staff have been doing just a phenomenal job of connecting with the seniors and making sure that we’re okay,” Rosa said. “They’re letting us know that even though things are being taken from all of us, we know that at the end of it we’re going to make it through this.”

The curtain isn’t closing yet for Rosa.

She will once again take the stage next year at Central Michigan University, where she plans to double major in acting and integrative public relations.

Loren Fay — Western High School, Parma

Most people have a high school yearbook stowed away on a bookshelf in their home. It’s filled with photos of prom dresses that were out of fashion by the next year, “cutest couple’” awards given to seniors who inevitably broke up months later and athletic records that will be brought up at every class reunion.

For the yearbook staff, the spring section is tough to fill up.

Prom was canceled, the spring sports seasons were cut short before the first game and the gymnasium sits empty on graduation day.

Loren Fay, the yearbook editor at her South-Central Michigan high school, welcomes the challenge of curating a tome to illustrate what it means to be a high school student during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Even though the rest of her classes are done now, she is choosing to continue to work on the yearbook as one of the only seniors in the class.

“Our spring section [of the yearbook] is very limited in coverage at this point, but the rest of the book was pretty much done by the time we got to March,” Fay said.

To make up for the empty pages that were saved for spring sports and prom night, the group decided to focus on seniors.

The theme this year is hindsight. It plays off the saying ‘hindsight is 2020,’ but is also a fitting theme for a year that generations will look back on — the mistakes made, the collective victories and the sacrifices.

Fay is helping to put together pages filled with senior athletes’ highlights, baby photos and awards.

With classes done and more free time than ever, Fay is grateful that she can dedicate more energy toward pulling together the senior class’ memories.

“It’s not as challenging as I thought it would be,” she said. “I pretty much work on the book every day and just get it done.”

Fay has an eye for design and visuals.

In the fall, she will be attending Columbia University in Chicago to study post-production film, which she hopes will be in-person.

If the university does move to online instruction, Fay said she likely will stay home with her family and take the classes virtually, but is curious to find out what art school will look like online.

Kenna Miller — Portland High School, Portland

Kenna Miller was gearing up for her final season of softball before COVID-19 hit Michigan.

Her Mid-Michigan team was excited for a spring break trip to Florida before that was called off just weeks before they were to leave.

For Miller, softball was a big part of her life. She started playing when she was about 3, and it wasn’t easy for her to give up her last season.

“I cried for a week straight,” she said. “It’s just knowing that it was my last season to play and I was going to be a starter on the varsity team.”

Despite having her school year cut short and last season of softball canceled, Miller still goes to work a few times a week. She is a caretaker at an assisted living center for senior citizens, where she works with some of the people most vulnerable to the disease.

She said the work can be emotional.

“Families can still come visit the residents, but they have to talk through the windows. They can’t come inside,” Miller said. “You can tell that they miss all their families, because when the families do come the residents get very, very sad when they leave.”

Miller says it is especially tough to help some of the residents understand what the disease is and why they can’t see their families.

But Miller has what it takes to help people, and that is why she plans to go to school for psychology and social work. She is attending Lansing Community College in the fall, where she hopes to play softball again before retiring her bat for good.

After that, she plans to transfer to Ferris State University and pursue a degree in social work so she can help children in Child Protective Services.

Vishnu Gundamraj — Okemos High School, Okemos

“I was really sad for the first two weeks,” Vishnu Gundamraj said. “It was kind of almost like grieving or mourning about not being able to see everybody again.”

But with his classes finished or moved online, he had more time to read and play guitar, interests that have been sidelined by school activities like lacrosse.

He also is able to spend more time with his grandparents, who moved in with his family right before COVID-19 hit Michigan.

“All of my grandparents, on my mom’s and my dad’s side, are living with me right now, so it makes for a full house. There’s always something new to talk to them about every day,” he said.

His grandparents immigrated to the United States from India, and he said he has learned how to cope with the hardships caused by COVID-19 by talking with them about the challenges they have overcome.

“I like to talk to them about that and hear their stories,” he said.

Gundamraj says that it’s been difficult to understand how historic this time is because of how abruptly everything came to a halt.

Seniors graduated on Thursday, but there wasn’t even an online ceremony last week, as other schools have done.

Now, without a formal conclusion to his senior year, Gundamraj is preparing to go to Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, to study marketing and entrepreneurship.

Alan Zhang — Bloomfield Hills High School, Bloomfield Hills

Alan Zhang is disappointed that his senior year ended abruptly, but he has his eyes on his next step.

Zhang is attending Harvard University in the fall, but isn’t quite sure what that will look like for him.

He said Harvard hasn’t come out with an official plan for the next school year yet, but gave some indication that classes may be moved online or class sizes reduced.

Zhang says he would rather have the university delay the school year.

“A lot of students have voiced concerns about this and there was actually a petition that was circulated within the Harvard class of 2024 that was basically asking the administration to postpone until we can resume on campus,” Zhang said.

However, the administration rejected the petition and announced the fall semester would start on time.

“Learning online is not the same as learning in person and you cannot have the same depth of learning, in-class discussions and engagement that you would have in an in-person classroom setting,” he said.

Zhang said he is also concerned that moving classes online would create inequalities for students who lack the resources that a college campus offers.

“I think the pandemic itself has revealed a lot of fundamental problems and inequities, and it reveals a lot of problems with the way that our society is structured in that we’ve had years of cost-saving measures and years of neglecting our infrastructure,” he said.

But as a student who plans to study biology and enter a pre-med program, Zhang said COVID-19 also has revealed the heroic sacrifices that health care workers take.

“I know that the pandemic highlights the kinds of sacrifices health care workers have to make in order to keep their patients safe, and I am more than willing to step up for that in the future,” Zhang said.