Editor’s note: Wel­come to The Pan­dem­ic is Per­son­al, a week­ly series focus­ing on on how the nov­el coro­n­avirus (SARS-CoV­‑2) is affect­ing the every­day lives of peo­ple through­out the Pacif­ic North­west. We hope to enlight­en you and reflect on what you and oth­ers are address­ing as this pan­dem­ic runs its course.

If you have a sto­ry to tell, please feel free to con­tact us.

This week, NPI’s Tran­sit Advo­cate Bob­by Aiy­er reflects on what it’s been like to fin­ish high school dur­ing the coro­n­avirus pandemic. 

Bob­by joined NPI’s staff in Jan­u­ary of 2019 and helped orga­nize the cam­paign to defeat Tim Eyman’s incred­i­bly destruc­tive Ini­tia­tive 976, which sought to wipe out bil­lions of dol­lars in fund­ing for mul­ti­modal trans­porta­tion projects. I‑976 is cur­rent­ly being chal­lenged in court by a coali­tion of plain­tiffs that includes Seat­tle and King Coun­ty. Bob­by has also had the pri­ma­ry respon­si­bil­i­ty of pro­vid­ing NPI’s cov­er­age of Sound Tran­sit and King Coun­ty Metro’s work to improve mobility. 

I grad­u­ate high school in a few weeks, which makes me a mem­ber of the Class of 2020. Here are some fun facts about our class, the good souls born between the autumn of 2001 and the sum­mer of 2002:

• We can’t quite decide if we’re part of the mil­len­ni­als or Gen­er­a­tion Z. I spent my ear­ly child­hood in a world with­out gad­gets, but became very pro­fi­cient in using them by the age of nine.
• We were born after Sep­tem­ber 11th, 2001. We hear a lot about how the world changed on that day, but it was before my time.
• Most of us were not alive when the Seat­tle Mariners last made the Major League Base­ball play­offs with Ichi­ro and Edgar Martinez.

It’s strange that my class is now infamous.

Every­one knows us as the class to grad­u­ate into a pandemic.

I’d nev­er expect­ed my class to receive so much atten­tion from so many peo­ple. After the state shut down schools for the rest of the school year in April, the vir­tu­al proms, grad­u­a­tions, and oth­er atten­tion afford­ed to us by fig­ures rang­ing from John Krazin­s­ki to Barack Oba­ma have been unprece­dent­ed and inspiring.

And while the atten­tion is nice, I think most of my class would agree that we’d give a lot to be stress­ing about prom groups and grad­u­a­tion invites in rel­a­tive obscu­ri­ty right now.

I can’t say I logged on to any of the events; at their core, these events empha­size that the Class of 2020 is los­ing out on some­thing, and I don’t like that insinuation.

I’ve found it hard to rumi­nate about the mile­stones I nev­er expe­ri­enced. It’s eas­i­er to just accept it as a strange tran­si­tion from one stage of life to the next.

In a world that is con­stant­ly chang­ing, the edu­ca­tion­al expe­ri­ence my peers and I are receiv­ing is ever-evolv­ing as well.

In ear­ly March, as reports of cas­es first began to spread in Wash­ing­ton, school gin­ger­ly sol­diered on. Maybe twen­ty per­cent of stu­dents stayed home each day; around dou­ble the aver­age dai­ly tal­ly. It took a week until the school dis­trict pro­vid­ed each teacher with clean­ing sup­plies, but they came.

Then the ham­mer fell on March 13th. As we head­ed home (lit­tle did I know, for the last time ever), the dis­trict announced that school would be sus­pend­ed for two weeks. The next day, the gov­er­nor announced a sus­pen­sion for six weeks.

We did­n’t have any new learn­ing until April 20th.

Teach­ers were required to give stu­dents enrich­ment mate­r­i­al, but engage­ment was option­al. And the clo­sure was extend­ed through the end of the school year.

Now, in our dis­trict, mid­dle and high school teach­ers post week­ly assign­ments for a grade. Live new instruc­tion over video call is not per­mit­ted; option­al online office hours video calls have sparse atten­dance. High school tran­scripts will read either A‑with-a-pan­dem­ic-aster­isk or Incom­plete, so as to not dis­ad­van­tage the siz­able minor­i­ty of stu­dents unable to access remote learn­ing at all.

Right­ful equi­ty con­cerns dri­ve cau­tious decision-making.

Yet inevitably, Wash­ing­ton par­ents are very wor­ried about stu­dents falling behind. Every­one is try­ing to make do, but the long-term con­se­quences of not adapt­ing instruc­tion meth­ods in the fall are troublesome.

Stu­dents only have so many years to spend in the class­room, and each grade’s cur­ricu­lum builds upon the next. The lone bright spot has been the admin­is­tra­tion of Advanced Place­ment (AP) exams for col­lege credit.

As edu­ca­tion sys­tem around the world can­celled final exams in lieu of teacher-pre­dict­ed results, the tests were short­ened for online administration.

So long to the three-hour alba­tross­es of exams hun­dreds of thou­sands of high school stu­dents endure each May in stuffy gyms (with proc­tors blar­ing through mega­phones remind­ing me of a favorite SNL sketch).

These tests last­ed forty-five min­utes long and were com­plet­ed from the com­fort of home. My Span­ish exam was entire­ly based on speak­ing and com­plet­ed on a cell phone appli­ca­tion. The app read out the prompts, record­ed my response, and was done in twen­ty min­utes. How cool is that!

The tests weren’t with­out con­tro­ver­sy. How­ev­er, the adapt­ed for­mats both ensured that stu­dents would receive the col­lege cred­it they earned, and marked a move towards reduc­ing the impor­tance of stan­dard­ized test­ing in admissions.

I am priv­i­leged to go to a pub­lic school where the vast major­i­ty of stu­dents go on to attend col­lege after grad­u­a­tion. Much like the rest of the world, we’ve been mak­ing the most of a strange situation.

As the world began mov­ing online, we were faced with a crit­i­cal deci­sion: com­mit­ting to a col­lege for the next four years of our lives from our bedrooms.

In the spring, col­lege-bound kids across the nation attend cam­pus vis­its or local infor­ma­tion ses­sions to find the best fit and make a deci­sion. The Class of 2020 was no dif­fer­ent, but instead we were asked to make our deci­sions through­out the month of April, at the height of lock­downs and uncer­tain­ty about the future.

We made up our minds not know­ing a lot of things.

Not know­ing if our fam­i­lies would still be able to con­tribute finan­cial­ly to our edu­ca­tions. See­ing the uncer­tain and mea­ger finan­cial aid offers that sud­den­ly-pen­ny pinch­ing uni­ver­si­ties were hand­ing out.

No clue whether our edu­ca­tions would be moved online.

Not know­ing whether an online edu­ca­tion would be worth it.

Uncer­tain­ty about when it’ll be safe to head to cam­pus — and if we left home for the first time to col­lege, when it would ever be safe to return to our families.

For the unlucky, not know­ing whether the insti­tu­tions would sur­vive come fall.

I per­son­al­ly know mul­ti­ple seniors just like me whose col­lege deci­sions were shaped by these vari­ables: turn­ing down dream schools they’d worked hard to gain admis­sion to because they could­n’t make the mon­ey work; decid­ing to enroll in uni­ver­si­ties clos­er to home to avoid the risk of long-dis­tance trav­el; pre­fer­ring small­er, rur­al col­leges in states with low case counts in a vain hope that the fall term will look some­thing like what we think col­lege could be.

Pub­lic and com­mu­ni­ty col­lege has become a much more pop­u­lar option.

While decreas­ing nation­wide, total first-year enroll­ment for Fall 2020 actu­al­ly increased slight­ly at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Washington.

It makes sense: if you’re going to com­plete a col­lege edu­ca­tion from your bed­room, why spend go tens of thou­sands into debt for a pri­vate edu­ca­tion when local pub­lic insti­tu­tions will pro­vide a sim­i­lar, if not bet­ter, experience?

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, our path ahead is murky. Most col­leges and uni­ver­si­ties have yet to make a final deci­sion on what the upcom­ing aca­d­e­m­ic term will look like.

For the few that have decid­ed, the path ahead varies:

• The twen­ty-three cam­pus large Cal­i­for­nia State Uni­ver­si­ty sys­tem plans on most cours­es being online for 2020–21, with lim­it­ed exceptions
• Mon­tana State Uni­ver­si­ty moved up its fall term to end before Thanks­giv­ing, pri­or­i­tiz­ing an on-cam­pus, social­ly-dis­tanced model
• Near­ly all major Cana­di­an uni­ver­si­ties, includ­ing the Uni­ver­si­ty of British Colum­bia and McGill Uni­ver­si­ty, have announced total dis­tance learn­ing through the end of 2020

When you com­pare the pub­lished plans, the com­mon­al­i­ties are clear: no large lec­tures, only small dis­cus­sion groups or labs; no room­mates, and very few oppor­tu­ni­ties to make the inter­per­son­al con­nec­tions that are wide­ly con­sid­ered inte­gral to the Amer­i­can col­lege experience.

I think we’re all disappointed.

And I’ll be hon­est: ini­tial­ly, the sense of loss was huge. The spring of senior year is a chance to cel­e­brate our accom­plish­ments of the past four years. To thank teach­ers and men­tors (and pull pranks on them), to cel­e­brate friend­ships, to enjoy life in our home­towns before we head our sep­a­rate ways.

We under­stand what’s being asked of us, and we want to do the right thing. We are in a for­tu­nate posi­tion: we com­plet­ed most of our high school edu­ca­tion before the pan­dem­ic and have secure, if ever-chang­ing, plans for next fall.

We are thank­ful for the roofs over our heads, for the food on the table, for stay­ing healthy and being less at-risk for the coronavirus.

The Class of 2020 has had it good. At my pub­lic school on the East­side, noth­ing has been unprece­dent­ed­ly bad dur­ing the past ten years of our lives. It was unprece­dent­ed­ly nor­mal. No waves of mass lay­offs dur­ing eco­nom­ic cri­sis, no fall-out drills in the event the bomb hits us, no anx­i­ety over being draft­ed to fight for­eign wars. Just good old-fash­ioned high school things: sec­ond jobs, Fri­day night foot­ball tail­gates, pesky labs you for­got to make up.

You hear a lot some­times, the crit­i­cism that young peo­ple are too unap­pre­cia­tive, self-absorbed, mate­ri­al­is­tic — you know, the avo­ca­do toast trope. While I’d argue that’s inac­cu­rate, I think my gen­er­a­tion always has the poten­tial to grow.

Know­ing­ly or not, a lot of us took that sta­bil­i­ty for grant­ed. We now know it not to be so. This is our gen­er­a­tion-defin­ing cri­sis, and it will be so inter­est­ing to see how we apply our expe­ri­ences as we become more pow­er­ful in society.

We are gain­ing so much per­spec­tive. Every sin­gle one of us is being taught to val­ue the things that mat­ter. To find out what mat­ters to us. To be flex­i­ble and under­stand­ing. To make sac­ri­fices for the greater good.

Just like Sep­tem­ber 11th, 2001 changed a gen­er­a­tion, the world­wide nov­el coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic will too. It’s already happening.