Students Cope with COVID-19

Over the past year and half, the whole world has had to deal with the rapidly spreading virus, COVID-19.

In March of 2020, a global pandemic report was released. Many didn’t realize the severity of the situation until people started dying, and the population had to quarantine to help stop the spread of illness.

Due to all of this, the Fair Grove School district went on spring break, but then didn’t return to school until after the summer. Cooper Zumwalt said, “I first realized that the situation was getting serious when our spring break kept getting longer and longer until, eventually, we didn’t come back to school.”

Although this global pandemic affected lots of people, some students believe that it isn’t as serious. Natalie Nolan added, “If we are going to be honest, I get that it is somewhat serious, but even now I don’t think it’s a huge deal.”

No matter how the students felt about this, the quarantine took a large amount of time from our social life. Cooper added, “COVID has affected my social life by limiting some relationships that I have. Looking back, some of my friendships may have turned out/would have been strengthened differently if COVID never happened. On the other hand, I also did make a lot of new friends via social media during the quarantine, which was nice.”

Many kids experienced depression due to the lack of social interaction. Madilyn Ellis said, “I haven’t seen my grandparents in over a year, and I haven’t been able to spend as much time with my friends outside of the regular school hours. It didn’t really affect my family other than not being able to see grandparents until dad got COVID. It just made us all worried about the health of our family and how it would affect our future.”

This all was such a huge change that people of all ages had to find ways to cope. Zumwalt commented, “I’ve coped with changes by diving into my activities and focusing on doing what I love. I’m trying to take the positive out of the situation and work with what I have. This is challenging to do at times, but I know that one day everything will go back to normal.”