With the amount of COVID cases in schools, students like YR Media’s Nina Thompson feel they have to make a choice: go to school and risk catching COVID or stay home and fall behind in class.
I’m a sophomore in high school. After winter break, I wasn’t sure how safe it would be to return to in-person learning with COVID cases on the rise.
I waited for an email announcing the temporary shift to online learning. But I never got it. So I figured it was safe enough to go back if my school wasn’t closing.
But on the first day back after winter break, I’d never seen so many empty seats before. In one of my classes, almost a third of the students were absent. That’s when the truth sunk in. I knew that cases were bad, but not this bad.
After a couple days of being back in person, I decided it was time to stay home until COVID numbers went down. At first it seemed like that was okay. The school would understand. Or so I thought.