It’s been a while since students have returned to school in-person due to the outbreak of COVID-19. March 13 was the last time students attended San Mateo High School, and the last time students saw their friends and teachers face-to-face. School closure was only predicted to last for a couple of weeks, but kept on getting extended as cases increased. . The United States has now surpassed 5,000,000 cases and 200,000 deaths, and a vaccine is still yet to be found. Now, here we all are at home doing online school for at least half of the 2020-2021 school year. Learning through Zoom has been new to all of us, especially seeing and interacting with teachers and classmates virtually.
The number of cases in the United States has somewhat started to slow down, but there are also many raging wildfires in the west coast of the country. Recently, there have been heat waves over the weekends causing wildfires to surge bringing toxic air. Places like New York City have been reporting that people can see smoke from the other side of the country. It looks like these problems are not going away soon and meaning that it won’t be safe to go back to school at all. Right now, it is better to stay inside and follow social distancing guidelines when going outside.
I asked a student from SMHS to give her opinion on when it is best for schools to start reopening. “I think the school should start opening again next year because it is kind of impossible for the school to reopen in the second semester since coronavirus is still a big deal and so many people are trying to be cautious,” said Ayari Katafuchi, a junior at San Mateo High School. “Not only about corona, it’s also going to be hard and challenging for us, the students, to go back to school a year after we went to school the last time. We have to catch up so much in the new classes in person,” she added on.
Due to all of these ongoing problems, it looks like we will be staying in our houses for a while. It’s possible that we will be in online school throughout this school year meaning that students will start learning in person around 2021 in my opinion. Is it possible that seniors won’t have a proper graduation like they did last year? Will we not see our friends and teacher in person? After all, we are still currently in a pandemic and there are fires that still need to be contained.