ULTIMATE TEST OF COURAGE
High school seniors reflect on a difficult struggle to keep focus amid 3 academic years of COVID-19 chaos
Ask Western Pennsylvania high school seniors what the date March 13, 2020, means to them, and they’ll probably tell you: the last “normal” day of their high school career.
Julia Ehrenberger was in her ninth-period Spanish class at Shaler Area High School when the principal came on the loudspeaker. Hunter Fritz was talking to his girlfriend in chemistry class at South Side Area High School in Beaver County when the pronouncement came down — schools would be closed for two weeks on the order of the governor of Pennsylvania.
“I thought it was going to be a nice little break,” said Julia. “I was excited at first.”
Two weeks turned into at least two months out of school buildings in 2020. And depending on where they lived, it may have been many more months at home in 2021 as well. High school seniors in Western Pennsylvania have had radically different experiences over the last two years: some were in the buildings, some were out; some are still wearing masks to school, some aren’t. But for virtually anyone in the Class of 2022, it’s been a high school experience like none other.
Clockwise from top left: Seniors Hunter Fritz, of South Side High; Julia Ehrenberger, of Shaler High; Corynn Hauser, of Rochester High; Madeline Douglas, of Woodland Hills High; Evan Isenberg, of Bethel Park High; Hannah Shin, of North Allegheny High; and Nijhay Burt, of Steel Valley High
Hunter Fritz
At first, Hunter Fritz enjoyed sleeping late after his high school, South Side Area in Hookstown, closed abruptly in March 2020. But as the spring went on, there were challenges. Only his chemistry class had regular Zoom meetings — He was on his own to get work done in the rest of“I wasn’t very good at time management — I
“I wasn’t very good at time management — I tend to procrastinate a lot and my grades started slipping,” he said. “The pandemic taught me to govern myself a little. I started to pick my grades back up and boost my GPA.”
For Hunter, 17, of Clinton, fully online school didn’t last long. Junior year began with five days of in-person schooling and continued that way except for a few weeks around Thanksgiving and Christmas of 2020.
But at first, in-person school was difficult to navigate as well. Because his 13year-old brother has a heart condition that put him at higher risk for complications from COVID-19, Hunter was nervous about getting too close to other students who weren’t taking as many precautions as his family. “It was kind of scary, honestly,” he said. “You had to be careful of who you were around.”
And even though students were in person, school felt different too. “We couldn’t work in groups, the desks were spaced out a lot, [and] we had individual student desks in the cafeteria,” he said. “You couldstill talk to people, but it was a lot more quiet than it wouldhave been.”
Hunter still played football — with masks except during games and conditioning and even for a time with vinyl coverings on the bottom of their facemasks. And he was able to start a program he’d been planning on ever since he heard a presentation about being a pilot in eighth grade home economics class: the Aviation Academy at the Community College of Beaver County, where high school juniors and seniors earn credits toward an associate’s degree.
The program has continued even through COVID-19, although online instead of taking the bus from the high school to CCBC. Although it is sometimes more difficult to grasp material online versus in-person, he plans to continue studying aviation.
In school this year, COVID-19 isn’t as much of a presence. South Side Area lifted its mask mandate after the state allowed schools to do so, and hardly anyone is wearing masks now at the high school, Hunter said. Traditional lunch tables have returned, and for the most part, “there’s very little difference from my sophomore year to now,” he said.
Still, he knows that these last few years have changed him.
“Honestly, I’m a believer that bad times make strong men,” he said. “I feel like that’s exactly what happened to me. We were put in a really crappy situation, and we made the best of it. I feel like we can combat adversity better than we could have had this not happened.”
Julia Ehrenberger
Both Julia Ehrenberger’s parents went to Shaler Area High School, and she grew up hearing them tell stories about it. But when Julia, an 18-year-old senior, thinks back on her time at Shaler, “I can remember my freshman and sophomore year, and then there’s just this gap, and all I remember is my dining room table,” she said. “I know that I’ll never get the same experience.”
After students were sent home in March of 2020, the spring of her sophomore year was honestly pretty easy, she said, and grades were turned intopass/fail anyway.
It was junior year when things started to get difficult. Shaler started the year fully virtual, then went to a hybrid schedule two days per week. Because Julia’s last name is at the beginning of the alphabet, she went to school in-person on Mondays and Tuesdays. The district went fully virtual again around Christmas and didn’t go back inperson for several months after. The district eventually got students back in-person four days a week in spring of 2021, with Wednesday as an asynchronousday.
Julia was taking both AP Chemistry and AP Bio at the same time her junior year and at times struggled to understand what was going on with so much virtual instruction. She also found it harder to form relationships with her teachers. “I feel like I didn’t have the connection with the teachers that I used to have,” she said. “You would see them on the screen, but we would never casually talk or make jokes.”
Senior year, they are back five days a week, and at first, the transition was exhausting. “The first couple of weeks back, I know that myself and my friends, after school we were just tired,” she said. “We had not been in a school setting like that for so long.”
This year has fewer restrictions than last year, although students are still required to wear masks and some events are different. Julia, who is captain of the tennis team and senior class president, heard some complaints from fellow students upset that the homecoming dance took place outdoors.
She finds wearing a mask “so normal now” that it doesn’t really bother her, although she knows it’s been a hot topic among some in the district. “The tension is more with the adults of the district,” she said. “I’ve been to a few school board meetings this year and even seen it on Facebook — They have debates on Facebook. The students have beenbetter about it.”
Her college search has been affected as well — both positively and negatively. Because of COVID-19, most colleges have made the SAT optional, which Julia has taken advantage of. She has found college tours to be awkward at times, however, trying to figure out the COVID-19 culture at each school on the fly.
She also knows that even with the negatives of COVID19, there have been positives. She feels closer to her parents and her two younger siblings than she did before with so much time spent at home. And she’s thankful for the parts of her senior year that dofeel complete.
“It’s difficult to make the best of such a horrible situation, but it is what it is,” she said. “I do feel like we were cheated out of a lot of it, but I do feel like we had it better than the seniors of 2020. I can’t even imagine.”
Corynne Hauser
Dealing with COVID-19 was hardly routine stuff for a high school teenager. But for Corynne Hauser, having a routine helped immensely in dealing with the ordeal.
Corynne is a senior at Rochester High School, a small school in Beaver County. She is a basketball star with a future in major college basketball, a student with better than a 4.0 gradepoint average. But when Rochester had remote classes for a while in the 2020-21 school year, Corynne found her routine paramount to helping keep her grades up.
“At home, there are so many distractions. You had to find ways to get things done and a quiet place to get things done,” Corynne said. “I’m a little bit of a morning person. I found having a routine worked well for me. I’d get up, make sure I’d shower quickly, go downstairs, set up my laptop and iPad. We would have a class that started at 8 in the morning.”
Corynne found learning remotely to be especially hard in chemistry class. Having classes in-person this school year has made her and others realize what they were missing.
“You can be on Google Meet, but you can’t really interact with people or hold a real discussion that way,” she said “We’re making memories now that you couldn’t make online.”
Corynne, a four-year starter in basketball who has won three WPIAL titles, has signed with Kent State to play basketball. Due to COVID-19, the NCAA didn’t allow colleges to host high school recruits until this past summer.
“We had to go to so many schools last summer,” she said. “It’s just so nice to be back in school.”
Nijhay Burt
Nijhay Burt was a football
star at Steel Valley High School who believes COVID19 seriously affected his college recruiting and also made it hard for him to get motivated for learning remotely.
But in the long run, Nijhay believes dealing with COVID-19 as a high schooler actually helped him.
“It bettered me because you had to learn to adapt,” said Nijhay, a Steel Valley senior who lives in Munhall. “There was really nobody to help you much with learning. My mom would go to work, and it was pretty much my [twin] brother and I in the house. We were tag teaming and working together. That bought us closer, to be honest.”
Steel Valley students took classes remotely when Nijhay was a junior, and he said students had been working remotely recently because of a rise in COVID cases at the school. Nijhay said he has maintained a 3.6 grade-point average.
“The hardest part [with remote classes] is to motivate yourself. You’re in bed. It was tough to get up out of bed, but you had to do it,” Nijhay said with a laugh. “Personally, I’m a hands-on learner. I need to see what’s going on. Not getting the help you need online was not helpful to me. But you had to do it. I think it prepared me some for college because in college, you’re by yourself a lot anyway.”
Nijhay had a terrific senior football season in 2021, leading the WPIAL in rushing yards during the regular season and finishing with 2,044 yards. He averaged a whopping 13.4 yards per carry, scored 35 touchdowns and played defensive back.
He believes COVID-19 hurt his recruiting. The NCAA granted all college athletes an extra year of eligibility — if they wanted — because of COVID-19. That created a logjam in recruiting for some high school athletes, especially at the Division
II level.
“A lot of guys should’ve graduated college but stayed an extra year,” he said. “That hurt me a lot. I think I would’ve been recruited more.”
Madeline Douglas
Woodland Hills High School senior Madeline Douglas always has the COVID-19 pandemic on her mind. And it’s not just because her school could close and move classes online from week to week or even day to day.
As the class president, Madeline must contend with complications the virus has brought upon her own education as well as planning events for the student body, such as homecoming.
The first attempt at the Woodland Hills homecoming dance had to be canceled in the fall over fears that it would become a COVID-19 superspreader event.
“Eventually we did find a way to work out how to not make it a superspreader event,” Madeline said, noting that everyone who attended was tested for the virus and wore masks. “But you always have to be aware of how COVID affects you, and then how the activity affects COVID.”
Of course, the pandemic has impacted Madeline beyond her responsibilities as president.
Woodland Hills was one of the last districts to return to in-person instruction after the COVID-19 shutdown began in March 2020. The district remained totally online until March 2021 and has shifted between virtual and in-person learning multiple times since then.
Her teachers have been supportive, she said, although she acknowledged that the frequent changes have been challenging.
“This year is especially hard going back and forth, trying to keep up with all of my assignments on Google classroom, and then just trying to keep up on all of my assignments when I’m in the classroom,” Madeline said. “There’s a to-do list online, but then there’s the to-do list for my teachers. So it’s definitely made it way more complicated to keep up as a student.”
Because of the amount of school work she has, her role as class president and trying to participate in other extracurriculars — including the international studies club, coding club, marching band and musical — she said it’s become hard to balance school and life “because it feels like school is life at some point.”
Madeline has had the opportunity to be in school and see her friends much more often since the release of the COVID-19 vaccines last spring. That socialization has helped her, she said, because her family was highly cautiousand secluded before the vaccine.
She said she is hoping to get out more in future months to visit potential colleges. The only ones she has had the opportunity to tour so far were Pitt and Drexel University in Philadelphia.
Madeline described her high school experience as chaotic but said it gave her “a lot of room for growth.”
“It’s grown me into a person more dedicated to serve my community and more dedicated to continue my education,” she said.
Hannah Shin
As the world closed in around Hannah Shin with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020, a whole new world opened to the 17-year-old who is now a North Allegheny High School senior.
Before the pandemic, Hannah became involved with the World Affairs Council of Pittsburgh and Rotary International, organizations that work to connect people worldwide and create bonds through their common humanity.
With the technology that became commonplace during COVID-19 quarantine, Hannah said she has made deeper connections with people across the world and has become more of a global citizen.
“I was able to have a lot more relationships thanks to COVID than I would have expected, and that is probably what I will remember most fondly about my time in high school,” Hannah said. “I got to be on Zoom calls with senior citizens across North America, I got to meet students from South Africa and Italy and Brazil.”
Hannah said she’s fortunate that North Allegheny had the technology available to make the transition to the virtual world fairly smooth. She said her teachers were quick to adapt to the remote format, and she feels as if she did not lose much learning, even early on in the pandemic.
Her work with the World Affairs Council, which she found her freshman year, made her realize that not everyone was as lucky as her.
For her final project for a two-year certificate program with the council, Hannah explored the multifaceted consequences that COVID-19 has had on individuals and their friends and families, as well as on the environment, economy and entertainment.
“It was a great healing experience for a lot of us,” Hannah said. “We all got to meet people we had never met yet and talk about issues that every single person could relate to.”
Amid the pandemic, Rotary International named Hannah to its international advisory council. She is one of only eight people on the council representing club members from more than 100 countries and the only high school student from the United States.
“This was made possible due to the global platform,” Hannah said. “I got to meet students from almost every continent, and I’m convinced that that opportunity would not have been able to work out the way it had if the world hadn’t become so much more globalized during the pandemic.”
Hannah will go to Harvard, where she plans to continue her global education by studying a mix of government — especially public policy — social studies and philosophy.
Back on a local level, Hannah serves as a student representative to the North Allegheny school board, where she has watched debates over masking and vaccinations play out all year.
It is good to have the discussions, she said, although she has noticed a strong polarization in the community that she believes reflects society at large.
The debates over the mask policy are not an issue to students, but the implications of the policy are worrisome because it affects everyone, Hannah said.
“I don’t think the debate itself is drastically infringing on anyone’s learning experience, though the policy with the mask has the potential to influence a lot of the most immunocompromised in our community,” she said. “I think that the policy itself holds a lot of power, but the debate is not preventing anyone from being able to focus and study.”
Hannah said that her experience in quarantine gave her time to think about what she wanted to do.
“I wasn’t really sure what to expect going into high school with what activities I would get involved in, but after quarantine I came to realize that it isn’t really about picking and choosing which activities I want to do,” Hannah said. “It’s more about analyzing my community and what it needs and just naturally becoming more involved in that and doing what I really enjoy doing.”
Evan Isenberg
Evan Isenberg said he remembersbeing told in March 2020 that the COVID-19 closure would last only a week or two, then everything wouldreturn to normal.
At the time, he was among the students preparing for Bethel Park High School’s spring production of “Guys and Dolls.”
The costumes were ready, the music was set and the show was about a week away from opening when the school — like all others across Pennsylvania — was shut down.
The shutdown lasted longer than anyone anticipated, and the show did not go on. But Evan didn’t let that get him down, finding a resiliency that has kept him going through parts of three unusual school years.
Evan said the pandemic has taught him to “always have a positive attitude on things because once you hit a negative attitude, that just bleeds off into everyone else and it’s just a continuous cycle.”
Evan said learning in a virtual setting over the past couple of years led to him frequently teaching himself — a unique opportunity for a student who hopes to study music education at Duquesne University.
He said that experience will also give him a better understanding of what to do if he’s ever in a position to teach virtually.
“I have that experience staying organized online, keeping track of events over a screen, keeping everything packed in technology,” Evan said. “It’s not going back at all technology-wise. It’s not getting older. It’s always getting newer, so things are just going to stay on screen.”
He said he was fortunate in a way because he found himself searching for college at a time when longtime bedrocks of applications, such as admissions essays and
SAT scores, were becoming optional. He said that actually made the process easier for him than it would have been in previous years.
And he had good timing. He was able to visit Duquesne University right after in-person tours started up again.
Anna Rosemeier
Anna Rosemeier said she had great expectations for high school as she looked forward to preparing for higher education, so she was disappointed when everything came to a halt in March 2020.
But she believes that she and her fellow students at Bethel Park High School have grown while adapting to the complexities of going to high school amid a pandemic.
“We’ve learned a lot of things through it that I don’t think we would have learned until much later, like being able to be independent and trust where you are, and in classes taking what you’re given and really working with it and making sure you understand it,” Anna said. “I think a lot of those things you kind of get in college, whereas it was really nice and helpful to have this now.”
That’s not to say things have been easy for Anna or her classmates.
The Bethel Park School District was in an online model from March 2020 until January 2021.
Anna said her teachers did the best they could to keep students engaged and learning, although she ended up having to teach herself a lot of times.
“I think it was hard for a lot of students to stay engaged while we were online because it was all day, you were sitting at your desk looking at a screen,” she said. “[It] was hard to stay motivated for sure.”
But the work ethic and strength she discovered while overcoming those challenges made her return to in-person learning even better, Anna said, and she believes it will serveher well as she moves on tohigher education.
Anna enrolled at Seton Hill University and will enter a five-year physician assistant program in the fall. That program typically requires a student to spend time shadowing in hospitals, but the pandemic madethat impossible.
She didn’t let that stop her, though.
Instead, she participated in a number of virtual hospital shadowing experiences and worked as hard as she could to keep up on her studies so that she wouldn’t feel overwhelmed by the rigors she anticipates in her future education.
Anna said she believes that having her high school years interrupted by COVID-19 could actually be beneficial because of the resiliency and perseverance she developed while going through the uncertainty.
And she and her fellow students have also grown an appreciation for the small things, she said. Saying hello to a friend in the hallway or talking to a teacher after class now means much more to students.
“The difference from our freshman year to our senior year is really nice because we can see that people are not dreading going to school every day, and people are appreciating that they can be in school,” Anna said. “I think that’s a great thing that our high school experience has brought out, that people appreciate the little things they wouldn’tnormally.”