SENIOR YEAR DERAILED
Nepean High School Class of 2020 copes with an unusual end to their final year amid COVID-19
Anna Berglas, 17, hopes to find other occasions to wear the gorgeous dress she bought for her Nepean High School Grade 12 prom that isn’t happening this June.
Ellis Bissonnette, the school’s 17-year-old yearbook editor, is scrambling to replace pages that were supposed to be devoted to spring sports with selfies of students isolating at home.
And Patrick Pearson works shifts at Canadian Tire while waiting to find out whether COVID-19 will derail the 18-year-old’s plans to attend university in the fall.
The final months of the last year of high school are usually a bittersweet mixture of fun and farewells, as students wrap up their classwork while looking forward to prom, graduation and what lies beyond.
But the busy clatter of Nepean High School, a stately brick school in Westboro that usually teems with clubs, teams, projects and the dreams of a thousand teenagers, has been silent since midMarch. And the final months of high school for the class of 2020 have been quite unlike any that have come before.
Instead of noisy classrooms, students are at home glued to computer screens, finishing courses online and wondering what awaits them in a world altered by the novel coronavirus pandemic.
In-person classes have been cancelled until at least May 31. Public health authorities have yet to determine whether it’s safe to return to school this year at all.
Milestones that mark Grade 12 have been cancelled or postponed. Commencement will be held next fall, date unknown. Spring sports tournaments, band concerts, the school musical, all cancelled.
Fiona Haugen, 18, sums it up: “It kind of sucks.”
Overnight, Haugen’s hectic extracurricular school schedule evaporated.
She belonged to a social justice club that was supposed to plant vegetables this spring in the school greenhouse for donation to a food bank. She’s on the prom organizing committee, which has decided to rebrand the event as a “reunion” party and hold it a year from now in May 2021.
And after playing rugby for four years, Haugen had become team captain. They had a shot at the spring championship.
For her and thousands of high school students across the province, there’s a sense of loss. “We kind of missed out on that bonding experience, and getting to say goodbye to our friends before going off to university,” Haugen said.
Principal Krista McNamara said all those clubs, connections and relationships are a “huge part of school.”
“It’s hard for them to make sense of this,” she said. “We can empathize with the students about what it feels like ... (wondering) where are we going? And what will that look like?”
There are no easy answers. Teachers have tried to ensure there is academic predictability, online class content, developed on the fly, has been condensed and expectations kept modest.
Exams have been cancelled. Work is being assigned, but final grades can only go up from the baseline of where they stood when schools closed.
Education Minister Stephen Lecce has made his expectations clear: no Grade 12 student who was on track to graduate when schools closed will fail because of COVID-19.
Educators recognize that students are under stress. Some have family members who are ill, are working in suddenly high-risk occupations, such as health care, or have lost their jobs. Other students have become babysitters for younger siblings or have taken on part-time jobs.
Nepean math teacher Nadia Amimi said her students have adapted well to online learning. “I think their anxiety and stress is coming from the fear of the unknown, I don’t think it’s coming from the content of the material we are teaching them right now,” she said.
Some of her students worry they aren’t getting all the knowledge they need in the condensed curriculum to tackle university-level math and science courses next year, for instance.
Not being able to see friends and participate in school events “just adds another element of anxiety and stress,” Amimi said. “In general, this is a scary situation, whether you are a student or not. All we can do is try to do our best to support them.”
Despite the sense of loss and uncertainty, students are adapting, both in school and out.
“There are all these mixed emotions,” said Russell Jean-Pierre.
Jean-Pierre, a competitive hockey player, said his practices and tryouts have been cancelled, along with gym workouts and noon hours shooting hoops in the Nepean High School gym.
So these days he practises his stickhandling in his yard, plays video games with friends and works part time delivering ice cream for The Merry Dairy.
He said he still hopes school may be back in session, if only briefly, in June.
“There all these mixed emotions,” he said. “I want to go back and see people and see my friends. Just to experience high school for one last time.
“That would be kind of cool.”