As a member of the Class of 2022, I would just like to say COVID sucks. We missed out on so many high school experiences because of it and quite frankly, I’m fed up with it like a lot of people in the world. Who would’ve thought going into high school we would’ve ended up with only one normal year. But thanks to science and immunity, we have gotten the rest of our senior year back. Although COVID took most of our high school experience away from us, it won’t take our senior prom and graduation like it did for the Class of 2020.

COVID-19 has now become a big part of our high school experience and when we think back, a lot of our memories will involve masks and regulations. But while COVID changed all our lives in some way these past few years, we never let it stop us from enjoying what we had. So I would like to leave a message to COVID-19.

“Dear COVID-19,

When I first heard of you, it was when school was canceled near the end of sophomore year. I didn’t hear anything about you prior to that. What we thought would just be a two week ‘vacation’ turned into a month. Then two. Then extended into the first half of junior year before finally, we had to come to school on a weird hybrid schedule starting in September. Then came senior year— you almost stopped us there too, but we’ve been fighting. You made us wear masks, having our faces covered at all times. It wasn’t until February of our senior year that life began to return to normal and the mask mandate was revoked. 

You took part of our sophomore year, all of our junior year, and part of our senior year leaving us  only with freshman year. But you won’t take out spirits. Sophomore year most of us enjoyed our lack of assignments and extra long summer vacation. None of us really thought so much about you until the world was shut down. But before all that, the Class of 2022 thrived.

Junior year; it was time for what was said to be the most difficult year of high school. The year started online with a schedule for each virtual class. If there was anything good about it, it was that we didn’t have to wake up at 6 a.m to go to school. This is when we slowly started to take you down and it was time to go back face-to-face. We still had to wear masks and only had three out of our six classes for three weeks at a time, but again, at least we got to sleep in. Navigating the most difficult high school year while you continued to cause chaos wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be.

Then before we knew it, senior year came along. We were back to our normal school schedule which was a relief at that point. After a certain amount of time, you begin to miss normal school. We started the year without masks for two weeks, before having to go back to them. Although we all were together in person still before masks went away, we lost part of face-to-face interaction wearing them everyday while also never being able to breathe fresh air. So the day we no longer had to wear them was a relief to me. Then in February we ditched the masks and all rules and regulations went away and the senior class has since been able to live out the rest of their high school career. We started to put you and all you have done behind us. 

So COVID, you tried to take us down, but you failed and we will now get to continue making high school memories without you for the remainder of our high school career.”

Sincerely,

Bree Soule, Class of 2022