4 years of high school interrupted by COVID. Here's what 11 Arizona graduates have to say
In the fall of 2019, high school freshman began their school year the way that Arizona high schoolers had for decades. There was excitement and concern about friends and grades, eagerness over sports and clubs and trepidation about navigating bigger campuses and meeting new teachers.
That normal experience of high school ended abruptly in the second semester when the COVID-19 pandemic hit.
The students who started high school four years ago had an unprecedented and unique experience. They were the first to have all four years of high school marked by COVID-19, from mandatory quarantines to face masks to online learning.
They were squarely in the middle of a historic moment. Now, they've graduated.
The Arizona Republic spoke to 11 students who graduated high school in May 2023 about their dreams, hopes and fears, about what felt mundane in high school and what felt exciting, and how COVID-19 changed things for them.
Here’s what they had to say.
Interviews have been edited for length and clarity.
Kat Alexander
Freshman year: “I was painfully, painfully shy. I could not talk to almost anybody in any of my classes. I went to a really small charter school that was very conservative and … a lot of the people there were members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. And as I was going through my own religious kind of struggles and trying to figure out my faith, I really didn't feel comfortable talking to a lot of people.”
Sophomore year: "A defining characteristic of my 10th grade year was just ... having a really hard time adjusting to going back to all the people and the things that I hadn't been interacting with for a year, especially since I never really connected with them in the first place because I've always been really shy. And being kind of in lockdown for a year ... kind of made it an even weirder experience for me to try to talk to people once I came back.”
Senior year: “(This photo) is me and my two best friends in our caps and gowns. ... They are definitely part of my chosen family and people that I do really feel comfortable with. ... This has been a year where I really have felt more comfortable in who I was and been able to have those fun times in life with my friends and just start to look forward into what's coming next instead of kind of being stuck where I am.”
Cloe Bolen
Freshman year: “My dad got diagnosed with cancer in January of 2020. ... After that, I kind of really struggled with a lot of things. And one of them was just seeing who I was as a person. And I didn’t really feel that much self-love. So I went and got my hair done this day, and I just remember how loved my dad made me feel. And he just complimented me all day. He sat through that entire hair appointment and was so excited for me. ... After this moment, I tried really hard to do things for myself, especially because the next month, we couldn't go to school anymore. ... I still struggled with making the connection of friends, but if I was able to just feel good in the moment about myself, that was a plus for me.”
Junior year: “I started my (film and television) internship ... my junior year, and I wasn’t really sure what it was going to entail, but I just knew that I was really ready for the challenge. … We ended up making an athletic hype video for my school, and that got nominated for an Emmy, and we actually won an Emmy with that video. ... That is the first time I ever got to fly a drone. It’s a drone that has this tiny little camera on it ... but, basically, it was the start of our McClintock athletics hype video.”
Senior year: "It was our senior sunrise. I'm the senior class president, so I was up that morning at, like, 3:45, getting things ready for people to come in. And I remember sitting in my car that morning before I walked into the field, just thinking about the fact that was my last year in high school and all the things that I've been able to do and started to realize where I’ve come. And one of the biggest things I was thinking about was my best friends, Harah and Brooklyn. ... I was just thinking about the fact that I never knew what it was like to have a best friend until I met them, and feeling valued and respected. It makes you feel really special in a way.”
Cesar Reyes Castillo
Freshman year: “I watched a lot of movies growing up — it was mostly Disney Channel — so I thought it was going to be a little bit like 'High School Musical' or 'Teen Beach Movie' or maybe like 'Mean Girls.' But it wasn’t really like that at all. In the movies, there is a lot of grouping — of the rock kids, the skateboarder kids, the popular kids, and then the football team or the basketball team. And in high school, there’s still groups, but they don’t really hold any power over the other. It’s just mostly friend groups, and then that’s it. There’s not much that they hold over other people.”
Sophomore year: “Keeping in touch with my friends ... was actually not that difficult. We mostly used either Instagram or the Teams (software) that the school gave us on the computers. I think our favorite way to communicate was on Teams. … We didn’t even talk about school or anything. We would stay on a video call for, like, five to seven hours. It was insane. … I had plenty of people to communicate with, so I didn’t feel as isolated. But then there were times when I would be home alone just doing school, and that felt really lonely and also overwhelming.”
Senior year: “Senior year, I was so ready to go into all the clubs I could go to. And then I got kind of pushed out because culinary has an a.m. period that takes four or five hours of your day. … That’s when we start up the culinary cafe. We try food and drinks and just everything that goes into a little restaurant. … I had to pick the clubs that I really wanted to be in so that I could do those and still focus in culinary. … I had to pick the GSA (Gay Straight Alliance) club, which I was president of, and I picked the Metro Mentors, which is just upperclassmen helping the freshman class with their studying, and just anything that they need. … Culinary is … reserved for juniors and seniors. So, I went in culinary, and I wasn’t expecting much. I knew it was ... a big program, but I didn’t expect it to be as big as it is. ... But going in there and being hands-on definitely was a really happy moment for me, just knowing that I was going to be able to cook in school. That just blew my mind.”
Analy Cota
Freshman year: “I go to school downtown, and I'm very involved with my school community: student government, National Honor Society, just like things we do at school. I like learning, so I think I enjoy going to school. ... And then I also play sports. I like challenging myself in sports that I don't necessarily think I'm good at. I like seeing how much I can improve.”
Sophomore year: “During virtual learning ... I missed seeing people. Even if I didn’t talk to them, their faces are familiar to me. And that’s nice to me. And I know that I can have a conversation with them. I am a very social person, so it was hard to not see them until I turned my camera on during virtual learning.”
Senior year: “I went backpacking in Alaska. … Our third day we did a seven-hour hike or something like that. And it was all new, and it was literally my breaking point. ... I was like, 'I can't do this anymore.' It was day three. Seven-hour hike; really muddy ATV trails for most of it. I was hating every moment. ... Sometimes you just take a breath and just keep going. Eventually, I had to get there, and I knew I was gonna get there. It just took mental strength.”
Xiomara Flores
Sophomore year: “At the beginning of my sophomore year, the only thing I really had going for me was marching band season, which I decided to join because everything else was in the air. But this opportunity sprung up. … So that’s where I met one of my really good friends now. … It only lasted for a little bit, but even being able to experience that and have some sort of activity outside of school was definitely very, very good.”
Junior year: “That year, I had joined the Latino Club here on campus. It was the first year that it had been formed. There was this opportunity to be able to go to the Capitol and help an organization called Aliento. They were, at the time, advocating for Proposition 308. … It was really a good experience and that was the beginning of my advocating era, you could say.”
Senior year: “That’s just basically my family and everyone that has always supported me through my journey this past year. I feel like it really made up for all of the years that I did not get to experience a lot of things through high school, and just having them by my side and having them there with me enter through a new year, it just really showed the love and support I have around me and in my community. … I was very determined to be involved in as much as I could for my senior year, so I went to my first homecoming since all of that got canceled — it was modified during COVID. I went to my first prom. I also graduated from a program at ASU called the Hispanic Mother-Daughter Program.”
Miah Gomez
Freshman year: “They had put me in a bunch of Gilbert schools all my life. ... And I think I learned to make friends by code-switching and adapting, and trying to be a part of something that maybe wasn’t really me. … When I went to Mesa High, it was a reverse of everything I’d ever taught myself to be the right way to make friends. I relearned how to make friends in a way that, even though it was new, it felt more comfortable … just because there was a bunch of kids that looked like me. Whenever I felt myself trying to be something that I wasn’t, I was like, ‘OK, wait, I don’t have to act like that.’ ... I was able to be myself, and it was just very satisfying to me, so I kept wanting to make friends.”
Sophomore year: “Once my grandparents got really bad (sick with COVID-19), I stopped joining the (school) Zoom calls. I remember I had these emails that I had pre-written, just explaining what had happened ... and they just responded to me so quickly. … I had never experienced such understanding. I feel like everybody was just giving everybody mercy.”
Senior year: “At the end of junior year, I ran for student body president, and that’s what I am now. … I think (COVID-19) has shaped the type of leader I wanted to be because I think the virus made us obtain our own morals at a younger age; because we were forced to mature a bit. So with maturing comes the question of what’s really important to you. … I think it just gave me my values, and gave me what’s important to me, and made me care and be grateful for things that I had. … It definitely shaped the way that I led, and also, how much I believed I was capable of. Because … I was super depressed, and I had always had really good grades, and my grades had dropped a lot during the pandemic with my grandparents and everything. To have to go so low and work my way back up, by the time it was my senior year, I just had this mentality where it’s like, ‘I can do it.’”
Rose Handelman
Sophomore year: “The second photo I have is from my sophomore year. This was us hanging out at the mall. Things were finally starting to open back up. We were able to actually go in school again. ... It was nice kind of reintroducing myself to people because ... my hair grew out, I wore makeup. It was a complete change. ... That was a rejuvenation for me. I was able to be a new person. Honestly, it was a fun time for me. This was right before I moved to Arizona. So it was also kind of a sad time, too. It was like, ‘Oh, well, I just got out of a pandemic, and I barely just started hanging out with all my friends, but I’m leaving to somewhere else.’ So, it was this time of a lot of change, a lot of starting to realize, ‘My time as a kid is starting to close in.’ But it was also great because I got to finally see people again. I definitely missed people.”
Junior year: “The third photo I have is from my junior prom. My old high school was very strange, so we didn’t have proms or anything like that. So going to a more normal high school and actually doing the traditional things was really fun. … It was a really new time for me. I was going into this space where I knew literally nobody. I had an opportunity to make so many new friends and try some new things. I started choir for the first time ever at Hamilton. ... I’ve made some of my closest friends. Now, I feel like I’ve known them my entire life. I can’t imagine living without them now. And prom was just such a fun experience for me. I had no idea what to expect. My prom date was literally last minute. I convinced him to come with me because I didn’t want to be alone. And I was like, ‘You’re just supposed to go to prom. You’re supposed to do this in high school. Let’s just go.’ We didn’t have corsages or anything fancy. We literally just showed up together and ... we basically hung out. So we didn’t do anything crazy traditional. I didn’t even have normal photos. All of my photos from prom were literally just selfies.”
Senior year: “I basically applied to colleges just for fun. They give so many free applications, and I just kept applying to places just to do it. ... It was more fun than actually doing my homework. ... A little before spring break, I was like, ‘I’m going to probably go to ASU.’ ... I ended up applying to Barrett (Honors College) and getting accepted. ... It was just such a unique experience because I feel like most people talk to adults about their college decisions ... and honestly, the people who really helped me figure out my college stuff were my friends.”
Kenia Baxter Miles
Sophomore year: “I knew if I went in person (it) would probably be better for me to learn. And I knew that there wasn't really going to be a lot of people. So I was just going to help and kind of learn the school better since I wasn't really able to do that freshman year. ... It was kind of like a gloomy day ... and a weird feeling about it, but once you kind of got into class, the teachers you were able to kind of bond with.”
Junior year: “I've been cooking since I was 7, so I've really always had passion and love to do so. And I always wanted to kind of learn new things, to cook and kind of learn about different cultures as well. ... We were doing an assignment about making and creating your own yule log, which is a cake with cream in the middle rolled up, and then you just kind of make it look like one (a log) on the outside. But that was kind of the most creative thing I've ever done. And it was just kind of seeing everybody's ideas, how differently everybody kind of thought of their own. ... I thought that was very cool.”
Senior year: “A couple months after senior (year) had started ... I was going to be cooking for President Obama. … Emotion just kind of blew through me. I was crying. I was excited because, in my head, none of this would ever happen. It kind of felt more like a dream to me.”
Edith Rivera
Freshman year: “I kind of went through a dark point in my life because I lost both of my grandparents because of COVID. Yeah, it was really hard. ... It was the first time I was dealing with death within my family. It's like someone really close to me, and I feel like that took a toll on me, on my mental health. ... I had a good relationship with my parents, but I feel like it did grow a lot more deeper with them. ... Being more open with them, being more honest with them.”
Sophomore year: “Dancing. I was loving it. It was my whole world, my passion and everything. And then the pandemic hit, and then I went downhill ... stopped practicing it. I feel like I didn't have that escape anymore after the pandemic. ... Definitely going back to it like, I guess, I felt free in a way.”
Senior year: "My mom, she didn't get to go to college. She went to school and immigrated here. She didn't get the education she wanted, and that inspired me to take advantage of what I have. If I have the resources to go to school and take the opportunity — go to school and ... pursue what I want to pursue.”
Sahil Sud
Freshman year: "I think I was having a good experience in freshman year because I did have a lot of the friends that I made in middle school and I was still in contact with most ... of the people that I was close with. ... Especially because the way that my schedule, or my class schedule, was set up was I usually had like a couple people in each class that I felt comfortable talking to and felt comfortable like relying on. And I think that also allowed me to make new friends because I knew that I could take risks.”
Sophomore year: “Our family is pretty outdoorsy, so we try to hike pretty often. ... With COVID, it was pretty hard on us not being able to go outside. ... My parents sometimes would have to go into the hospital or the office. ... As time went by, we (Sahil and his sister) got more comfortable making our own food and regulating our sleep schedule.”
Senior year: “(My sister) used to always make fun of me and say, 'You know, your style isn't good. You got to improve it.' I had some friends who would do the same thing, so it's like, 'You got to go to these different stores … this is how you get to improve your style.' So I think with time I kind of relatively improved my style. I think this photo represents kind of the culmination of everything that was in high school.”
Holden Wilson
Sophomore year: “It was really hard to connect with people again when I got back. So I lost like a lot of friends after freshman year because I was just completely disconnected.”
Junior year: “Saving Oak Flat is primarily the thing we've been working on. It’s a good thing to be a part of it. What I had to do after freshman and sophomore year, I had to kind of focus on myself to figure out why someone like me would need to be a part of it. Not only because I'm Native American, but because I had to figure out my values towards this subject.”
Senior year: “Brophy … is a Jesuit school, and Jesuit education means being for other people, whatever you do. ... That's why I want to get into environmental science (and) be able to be an expert on the environment. ... Just to be an expert when, for instance, a foreign mining company wants to destroy a sacred site. Be an expert and show the science. ... How I want to serve is being able to just know the right way to do things and being able to be the one you go to for the right decision.”
This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: What Arizona high school graduates say about the COVID-19 interruption
