LOST IN THE PANDEMIC
It was supposed to be the most important semester of high school. Now, the juniors are trying to figure out how to move forward.
Everyone said it would be the worst year of his life.
¶ As the first semester of junior year began at San Jose’s Lynbrook High School, Shasta Narayanan braced for a brutal nine months. He’d take the SAT, teach coding classes for budding engineers, suffer through chemistry class and compete in hackathons.
¶ But in March, the world tilted. Hand sanitizer appeared in classroom doorways. Students were handed spray bottles to disinfect desks between classes. Suddenly, the question wasn’t how bad junior year might be — it was whether the rest of the year was going to happen at all.
¶ The answer came during fourth period on March 13, in an announcement over the loudspeaker: School was shutting down. Kids stared at each other, speechless, and pulled out their phones to furiously text friends in other districts. Narayanan’s art teacher gave up on her Powerpoint lesson.
¶ That afternoon marked the beginning of what will end up being months of academic and social limbo for thousands of high school juniors across the Bay Area. As distance learning has thrown school and family inequalities into sharp relief, kids struggle with a collective sense of bewilderment — mourning the most anticipated semester of their high school careers as it vanishes into a screen.
¶ In San Jose, Narayanan is grappling with an academic future completely different from the one he prepared for. In Concord, Katheryn Cooper is rehearsing plays alone in her room as the center of her arts education shifts underneath her. And in Oakland, football player Michael Sanders is trying to stay focused amid worries that friends he can no longer see may lose their way.
¶ In the absence of physical classes, kids’ experiences with distance learning are as diverse as their own circumstances — and personalities — along with how much support their home lives and schools can offer amid a global pandemic. At the same time, they share a palpable sense of loss for everything that this year promised to be — and wasn’t.
¶ “There’s nothing I can do to change it,” Narayanan said. “There’s no point really in spending time worrying about what’s going to happen.”
An uncertain future
Lynbrook High School is an intense school. Like other public high schools in the South Bay, its alumni list runs long with successful techies and business people, and parents of many current students are part of the workforce at Silicon Valley’s most prominent companies.
Eighty-six percent of Lynbrook’s student body is Asian American and just 6% of the students are eligible for free or reducedprice lunches. The mean SAT score last year was 1435 out of 1600.
“People are always trying to get higher grades, higher scores than everyone else. That’s probably the biggest part of Lynbrook,” Shasta Narayanan said.
For him and his classmates, the daily back-andforth with teachers and friends has dried up since California’s shelter-in-place orders took effect, as has the momentum that pushed them to work so hard last semester. Narayanan’s junior year curriculum now consists of solo assignments and click-through videos posted online, with just two Zoom calls a week. Advanced Placement tests, which usually last about three hours, have been shortened in length for kids to take at home; Narayanan and his friends worry that will make it easier for kids to cheat.
“Will colleges even accept these scores if it’s only a part of the class we’re being tested on?” said Narayanan, who’s slated to take AP calculus and U.S. history exams. “I’m not too sure how it’s going to affect us.”
Fremont Union High School District and many other Bay Area schools have told students they will now be graded on a passfail basis, in an attempt to keep things fair as schools, teachers, and families adjust to distance learning. Narayanan has no idea what that means for his college prospects, including his chances of getting into the University of California system, where about 40% of Lynbrook grads matriculated last year, Purdue University or the University of Illinois.
Many kids at competitive high schools have grown up believing that getting certain scores and grades will lead them to a “pot of gold,” said Dr. Janelle Scott, professor at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Education. But those expectations have rapidly changed amid the pandemic, and colleges won’t be able to rely on traditional admission standards, such as GPAS, at least for the Class of 2021.
“There’s going to be a generation of students whose transcripts looked really different than before,” Scott said. “There are signals that universities can begin sending to school districts and kids about how they can perhaps embrace more holistic assessments of student applications.”
For Narayanan, disappearing into his own projects is a respite from all the uncertainty. Over spring break, he spent around 10 hours a day building a website to help desperate grocery shoppers find in-stock products based on their ZIP code. And he’s had more time to practice the mridangam, an Indian drum.
Still, he gets up about 8 a.m. every day and puts on jeans to stay motivated — a habit that his dad and sister make fun of, but that he says helps him feel like he has a routine. Most of the day is spent alone working at his desk monitor, looking out on the empty street below.
“I definitely put in a lot more effort this year, all just for one semester and the next one just doesn’t even matter,” Narayanan said.
Making do
At Contra Costa School of the Performing Arts in Walnut Creek, students “major” in pursuits such as theater and dance. Now, with school canceled and mass gatherings for events and concerts unlikely to restart for months, the most basic tenet of their education — performing — has disappeared.
Junior Katheryn Cooper felt the loss hard. This spring, she had planned to act in two shows and direct a third. Those shows — and the dozen or so others the charter school had scheduled — all have been canceled.
“I miss the physical closeness, sharing a physical space with people, the adrenaline, the feeling of knowing you’re going to go out and do the best performance you can,” Cooper said.
Rehearsals, though, haven’t let up. For one play, Cooper and her classmates have traded lines via Zoom while sitting in the “black box theater” of their closets, exploring “how to be alone together.”
At first, every scene dissolved into giggles. And there are still hiccups: Once a classmate’s mom was on an important conference call in the next room, forcing the student to run outside and stand in the rain to recite her lines.
The shelter-in-place has forced a major shift for teachers in the arts, said director Aejay Mitchell, who dials into rehearsals from Oakland.
“I’m trying to do more lecturing … which is not my jam,” Mitchell said. “As far as the rehearsal process, I’m having to look at what they’re doing at home and how they engage with their environments, like a field director almost.”
Now with rumors that Gov. Gavin Newsom might ask schools to stagger attendance in the fall, Cooper’s parents wonder what her senior year will look like, her mother, Carri Cooper, said. But kids are adaptable, she said, and they’ve found outlets.
Still, both acting and life have required extra imagination lately.
“I most miss sharing the experience with my friends. Because we’re together digitally, but if someone walked into my room, they’d see me at my computer, singing to myself,” Katheryn Cooper said.
Before rehearsals, or when she needs a moment to relax, she sits on her bed in silence.
“My mom calls it ‘taking a bath in everything,’” she said. “I close my eyes and just take a few deep breaths.”
‘I do worry about them’
In some Bay Area school districts, students and teachers are still grappling with the more fundamental question of how to keep kids in school, at home.
As soon as Bay Area campuses shut down in March, educators and experts warned that distance learning would likely exacerbate existing disparities in K-12 education, leaving low-income students further behind.
Michael Sanders worries it’s happening before his very eyes. A junior at the 2,000-student Oakland Technical High School, where he plays football, Sanders’ biggest concern during shelter-in-place has been whether his friends will drop out.
They text and Facetime daily, sometimes talking about football and girls, or his buddy’s part-time jobs at places such as at Safeway. In late March, some teenagers in his friend circle showed up at a 450-person sideshow, where three people were arrested.
“There’s nothing to do all day and they’re running around trying to make money, and not in the safest way,” Sanders said. “People are worried about coronavirus killing them; I’m worried about my people killing each other during quarantine.”
On a recent late afternoon, Sanders sat on the sofa of his mom’s two-bedroom East Oakland apartment, just off a phone call with his teacher. His mom was making hamburgers a few feet away while he finished a video about the Moorish rule of Spain.
History is Sanders’ thing, but it’s been a winding path to the good grades he gets now. He repeated kindergarten and a series of fights at school landed him in special education courses with attention deficit disorder and depression diagnoses.
“He’s come a long way. I’m really proud of him,” his mom, Tiffany Martinez, said. “I would like him to go to college and pursue whatever he wants to do. That time is coming, and it’s coming quick.”
Forty-nine percent of students at Tech are free or reduced-price lunch eligible, including Sanders and his three siblings. Martinez works the day shift at Shoprite a few blocks away, but she’s had to move her hours around to be home more with the four kids. It’s helped that Sanders’ guidance counselor drops off meals from the district’s meal giveaway each week, and that Comcast is providing free internet.
But sometimes the connection cuts out. And while students at Tech aren’t penalized for not showing up — an executive order from Newsom allows school funding to continue regardless of attendance — Martinez doesn’t want her kids to miss out.
“We just can’t make those times all the time. So that’s what really frustrates me,” she said. “As a parent, you have to be positive. Even if the world’s ending, you can’t tell them the world is ending.”
Other mentors are trying to make up for missed connections with kids they no longer see every day in school. Before the shelterin-place order, Sanders’ football coach, Virdell Larkins, hosted a team study hall every day before practice. Now he organizes a weekly team Zoom call and sends motivational quotes to a group text chat.
“I do worry about them,” Larkins said of Sanders’ teammates. “This is a tough time that they’re going through, as kids. so much uncertainty in high school. As a grown man this pandemic is hard — just think of an adolescent teenager.”
After graduation next year, Sanders plans to go to Laney College and then transfer to a four-year university. First, he needs to get through the boredom of the next few months, the routine of waking up, logging on, doing his work, logging off.
Junior prom is “done for,” he said with a sigh.
“I’m going to go all out for senior year. Start saving up my money now. I was thinking about a limo,” Sanders said. “But I’ll just wait for senior year because that’ll be the best time.”