San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
GRADUATES SHOW A LOT OF CLASS
For the teenagers born in the shadow of 9/11,
life itself has been an education
The members of the high school class of 2020 were born within months of Sept. 11, 2001.
Growing up in a country that has been at war since before they can remember, the graduates were marked by other events, easily adopted new technologies and social media and seemed brushed with an idealism severely tested in a cynical age.
The coronavirus collapsed their senior year into homebound “distance learning,” bigger family responsibilities and uncertainties not seen since the 1930s and 1940s.
Smacked by history, they are clearheaded about what they lost and what might lie ahead. Here are a few of them from San Antonio.
Kevin Rodriguez, East Central Independent School District
East Central High School’s
Army Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps never had been to a national competition in the program’s 49-year history but in December, its unarmed drill team and color guard qualified and began fundraising.
For Kevin Rodriguez, a senior and battalion commander, it was a sweet payoff for countless hours practicing after school and weekends. They raised the money to travel to Richmond, Va., but the coronavirus pandemic canceled the Army JROTC National Drill Championship, set for March 21.
It was the first of many closures and cancellations — classrooms shut, no prom, a radically altered graduation. The saddest part, Rodriguez said, is the online-only nature of goodbyes to his friends, teachers and ROTC instructor, Capt. Keisha Spaulding.
“The most impactful people that I had in my life … were my teachers,” he said. “I owe everything to them — the amount of inspiration they’ve given me, their belief in me.”
Rodriguez, 18, is graduating in the top 3 percent of his class and will be his family’s first college student. He plans to study aerospace engineering at EmbryRiddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Fla., and he’ll be joining its ROTC program.
“I go by the phrase, ‘Don’t cry over spilled milk,’” Rodriguez said, pointing out that JROTC teaches leadership, the ability to inspire and motivate others. So he looks forward to his team’s chance next year.
“There’s always that opportunity for us to try again,” he said, mentally keeping himself part of the group. “They saw what we could do this year, so they have to know and believe in themselves.”
Lola Sanchez, San Antonio ISD
As long as Lola Sanchez can remember, there were school events to commemorate 9/11, the day the United States was attacked.
The projects, the moments of silence and the prayers “showed us at a young age that there wasn’t just good in the world,” said Sanchez, 18. “We grew up questioning everything and knowing that violence and negativity is everywhere.”
That sense of social awareness led her to the Young Women’s Leadership Academy, known for its student activism. Sanchez thinks her class also was shaped by police killings of unarmed people of color and the national example set by students at Florida’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in responding to the 2018 mass shooting there — all amplified by social media.
“We saw the Parkland kids stand up, and then kids around the nation, including YWLA,” Sanchez said.
The first coronavirus case in New Orleans, which quickly became one of the country’s hardest hit cities, was reported on the day in March that she returned from an interview there at Loyola University.
“This happened in the middle of deciding where we’re going to school and that’s a really big deal, and none of us were ready to make that decision by ourselves,” said Sanchez, who like many of her classmates will be the first in her family to attend college.
As a freshman, she had founded her school’s debate club. As a senior, she missed the chance to compete in her final University Interscholastic League academic decathlon. Sanchez also had organized a summit for Our Tomorrow, a network of youth activists, but the event became a Zoom town hall and “it definitely wasn’t the same,” she said.
Loyola offered a full scholarship. Sanchez will attend on a pre-law track.
Logan Schreier, North East ISD
Logan Schreier, 18, still was in his mother’s womb on 9/11, and believes he was born into a world of heightened anxiety for most American parents.
“Our generation grew up more sheltered,” he said.
Nor is this the first recession he remembers. His family members had to sell their house in Houston nine years ago, downsizing in hard times. But ending up at the Design and Technology Academy, a Roosevelt High magnet program, was a silver lining.
“DATA and Roosevelt have given me a whole lot of leeway in giving me stuff that I want to do and pursuing my creative projects,” Schreier said. “I’m really thankful for that and I don’t know if I would have found something like that in Houston.”
He was in a “hack club,” which taught students to code, and as freshmen, he and a friend started San Antonio’s first high school drone league.
Just before Spring Break this year, the league acquired $2,000 worth of parts to build a racing fleet of micro quadcopters — mainly for new members, Schreier said, because they’re easy to assemble and hard to break. The equipment sat unused at Roosevelt, which didn’t reopen for the rest of the semester.
Schreier will attend Stanford University to study “symbolic systems,” an interdisciplinary major that combines computer science and psychology. And he plans to start a drone club there — but if the campus is closed this fall, he might wait until spring and get a job.
“Life happens,” Schreier said. Alan Fletcher and Diego Pensado, Northside ISD
At seemingly every science fair, Jay Science and Engineering Academy seniors Alan Fletcher and Diego Pensado had finished neck and neck.
The pair developed a friendly rivalry, from tying for fifth place as sophomores all the way to earning first grand prize in their divisions at a regional contest this year.
That landed them in a state competition and the prestigious Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair in Anaheim, Calif.— both canceled due to the pandemic, along with a chance at scholarships and networking.
“It’s really bizarre, but I think it’s a good opportunity to make our generation more adaptable,” said Fletcher, 18. “Once the world reopens, I hope it’s going to be different than it was before, where people aren’t taking as many things for granted.”
His project showed that an alloy known as nitinol provided quicker and more consistent “actuation” for prosthetic hands — he learned of it while watching the Discovery Channel, ordered some on Amazon and built an artificial muscle for comparison, needing 23 tries to get it to work. He plans a career in biomedical engineering and will attend the University of Texas at Austin.
Pensado’s work could allow doctors to find patterns in lung X-rays to help them diagnose patients. Using machine learning — stemming from a facial recognition project he did as a sophomore — he applied thousands of filters to X-ray images to create “X-ray thumbprints.”
Pensado, 17, called social distancing an “eye-opener,” and is trying to make use of the time away from the social and relationship pressures of high school to get ready for the engineering program at Texas A&M this fall.
“The biggest impact on everyone would be a greater appreciation for the little things,” he said. “A lot of people from my generation are going to realize that they need to appreciate everything we can, to always make every single day the best they can. Hopefully they come out of it with a better outlook.” Yasmin Banuelos, San Antonio ISD
The pandemic has taught Yasmin Banuelos, 18, how much she used to take for granted — like group volunteer work, and ceremonies that give students hard-earned, noisy public recognition.
Banuelos already is the first in her family to earn a degree — an associate’s from San Antonio College, where she is this year’s distinguished graduate for liberal arts — in addition to her diploma from Travis Early College High School. But SAC has postponed its commencement until November.
“I was really looking forward to that because it was an opportunity for my family to see all the hard work I have put into high school,” Banuelos said.
She’ll be in Lubbock by then, finishing a bachelor’s degree in business accounting at Texas Tech University.
“We were always reminded that we were a generation that was born during 9/11,” Banuelos said. “We will definitely be known as a generation that perseveres through undesirable circumstances.”
At Travis, she volunteered with Gamma Sigma Girls and GirlUp, working at SAISD’s annual 5K run and organizing school activities. GirlUp raises money for an annual spring trip, but Banuelos never got to take her last one. She won a prestigious $20,000 Dell Scholarship but there was no luncheon this year to honor the recipients.
Banuelos was moved by how the community supported her class. Thousands have joined Facebook groups to “adopt” local high school seniors, and she was surprised with gift cards, a journal, pens, chips and drinks. Her high school also gave seniors a Zoom send-off.
“I feel like a lot of people are rooting for us and they’re helping us through it,” Banuelos said.
Jesus Moreno, Edgewood ISD
The theater is Jesus Moreno’s life, and he shed tears when the cast list was released for his school’s performance of “Macbeth” this spring and he realized he had the leading role.
“I cried,” Moreno said. “I was so excited.”
And to put icing on the cake, his best friend, Joanna Escamilla, was cast as Lady Macbeth.
Then the pandemic brought the curtain down early. And it
brought down Moreno, 18, who's graduating from Kennedy High School and Edgewood Fine Arts Academy.
“I work at the theater, I live at the theater, I'm there 24/7,” he said. “I feel like I lost my purpose.”
It wasn't the same, Moreno said, but the actors put on a virtual performance mixed with footage from auditions and their own recordings at home.
He and his mom had moved to San Antonio from the Los Angeles area in summer 2018. He twice was a national qualifier at the Texas Thespian Festival and he received a distinction at the International Thespian Festival in Lincoln, Neb., last year.
Moreno plans to study journalism and theater at San Antonio College and the University of the Incarnate Word and hopes to eventually study dramatic writing and acting in New York. After hours studying Macbeth, he came to relate to the character in one key way.
“The thing we have in common is we're both ambitious,” he said. “We'll kind of do whatever … to get to where we want to.”
Dominique Lang, Judson ISD
Through four years as a cheerleader at Wagner High School, Dominique Lang always enjoyed basketball games the most.
The closeness of being stuffed in a gym with players and fans, the din of students stomping and chanting in the stands and the overwhelming school pride were unlike any other sport.
Wagner qualified for the state tournament for the third time in the past four seasons this year, but the team's pursuit of its first championship was canceled, ending the opportunity for players and cheerleaders alike.
“I just told myself, ‘You won't be able to change it,'” Lang said. “We're all experiencing the same thing. If I just think positively, and think about the good times I did have in cheer, that gave me closure.”
Lang started cheerleading as a freshman — a natural next step after eight years in gymnastics — and became a team captain this season.
She grew to enjoy feeling “like a big sister,” helping relieve conflicts within the group and encouraging teammates when the home quarantine began.
“Cheerleading has definitely made me more confident in myself,” Lang said. “I usually don't really talk that much in teams, but being a captain made me step outside the box.”
She has spent much of the slow period drawing or sculpting with polymer clay. Lang has for years enjoyed design, particularly houses, and hopes to be a residential architect. She'll be taking her 4.0 grade point average as a senior at Wagner to Prairie View A&M University in the fall.
The pandemic brought the class of 2020 closer together, Lang believes, even if they've been physically farther apart. The year-end cheerleading banquet was one of her favorite events, but this year the team simply lined up in their cars in the Wagner parking lot.
“I don't think I've lost anything,” Lang said. “If anything, I've gained more self-knowledge, and I've gained an appreciation for my friends more, for my family more, and definitely for my health.”
Aspen Palmer, SchertzCibolo-Universal City ISD
After moving to San Antonio from the small town of Vernal, Utah, two years ago, Steele High School senior Aspen Palmer found her place through theater.
She started acting at age 6 after watching her mother perform in community theater, and her final show as a high schooler was going to be Steele's performance of “Mosquitoes” at the UIL's one-act play contest. Steele advanced through the zone competition, with Palmer winning Best Performer honors. Then all future levels were canceled.
“It honestly feels hard to believe we aren't going to perform together again,” said Palmer, the Thespian Club president.
They had picked a serious play, steeped in realism, tussling with concepts such as loss, grief, depression and addiction. They spent two weeks just on character development, wanting interactions to feel natural.
Palmer played the Higgs boson — an elementary particle present in all things. The role positioned her as the show's narrator, requiring her to act independently of the other characters and pace the transition between scenes against a 40minute time limit, a challenge with multiple cast members rotating through certain roles.
She'll attend Brigham Young University-Idaho this fall to study theater education.
The pandemic has allowed her to spend more time with her three brothers. She's also come to appreciate her friends more, wishing she “would've hugged them a little tighter before this happened.”
She'll remember the parade of cars through the Steele parking lot on the last day of class.
“In a way, it's kind of cool, because what other class is going to be able to say, ‘Hey, we may not have gotten to graduate, but did you have a graduation parade through the parking lot?' ” Palmer said. “They're never going to forget the class of
2020.”