Some students found a safe haven in remote school. Now, they have to go back.

When Sky Yusuf came out as nonbinary and transgender in November 2019, toward the end of her first semester at UNC Charlotte, everything changed.

At first, responses to her emails took longer.

Then, the hate on social media started. She noticed people were “walking on eggshells” around her, and finally, she stopped receiving email responses from professors and peers altogether.

And a couple of months later, the world changed, too.

For some marginalized students like Yusuf, remote learning during the coronavirus pandemic has been something of a double-edged sword. Many Black and brown students have had less access to resources for learning and have fallen behind academically, disproportionately to their white classmates, and some LGBTQ+ students have lost “safe spaces” in classrooms and schools.

But for others, remote learning presented an unexpected reprieve from feeling uncomfortable and “othered” during in-person classes. Instead, they’ve found an environment they feel safe learning in — their homes.

When 19-year-old Yusuf received the message sent to students last spring that UNCC classes would be remote for the foreseeable future, she didn’t know whether to feel relieved or worried. For the next year, she’d attend all her classes online, saving her from possible unpleasant in-person interactions with professors and peers.

But now, she’s preparing for the inevitable return.

Many K-12 students are already back in classrooms. UNC Charlotte has moved some classes back to in-person and plans a full return in August. Students across the country are preparing to return to classrooms in the coming months as access to COVID-19 vaccines expand.

Yusuf feels mounting anxiety.

“I constantly felt worried that at any given moment, anything I said could put me in a position where I wouldn’t feel safe coming to class,” she said. “Now, those fears have metastasized.”

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Going the extra mile

During the four years Maddy Moss has spent at Myers Park High School, microaggressions have been commonplace, she said.

Students at the majority-white school sometimes came up to her in class and asked insensitive questions about her hair.

Moss is biracial, and the 17-year-old has long been self-conscious about wearing her hair in natural styles.

“I never got braids or anything because I didn’t want to be seen as a certain way at school,” she said. Most of her friends are white.

On the rare occasions she’d turn up to class with her hair natural, white classmates questioned if she curled her hair every morning. They’d touch her dark ringlets without asking.

She’s learned virtually for her final year of high school, and she said it’s done wonders to decrease her anxiety.

“I was just always feeling kind of out of place,” she said. “I definitely feel like my mental health is better.”

On the other hand, 16-year-old Jaylen Adams attends a school with more Black and brown students — Olympic High School. But she still feels out of place as someone who identifies as both Black and Puerto Rican.

“People will look for any opportunity to make someone feel different from them,” she said. “It hits me different because I’m mixed…. And it’s better for me to have remote in that regard.”

There’s no communication barrier with remote learning, she said, no hyperfixation on how she talks — she can just type.

Adams said since she started learning remotely, she doesn’t feel a need to “perform.”

Performing is something Kiersten Colmenares is used to. She first noticed she was different from her white peers at Randolph Middle School in south Charlotte.

“That’s when I actually encountered racism for the first time and felt like I had to go the extra mile in everything I did,” she said. “I was the only Latina in a group of white people.”

Colmenares, who is 16, started straightening her hair and actively trying to dress and speak like her peers, but it was still hard to connect with them, and she grew more distant from the Latino students, too, as a result.

That’s why she prefers remote learning. She avoids experiences like what happened in her classroom last year, when her teacher asked all of the students of color about their racist encounters. All of the students turned and stared when Colmenares was urged to share.

Since she started learning from home, Colmenares said she feels fewer eyes on her. After all, she can just turn off the Zoom camera.

The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools board voted to allow all students the option to go back to classrooms four days a week starting April 12. Neither Adams nor Colmenares will be among the students returning; Moss is graduating.

During the pandemic, Moss has experimented with different hairstyles at home, which she said helped her feel more comfortable in her Blackness.

Moss isn’t sure about where she wants to attend college yet — but she plans on wearing her hair natural around campus in the fall.

“Now, I’m comfortable going to school like this,” she said, gesturing to her neat braids. “Over time, I realized how ridiculous it was, hiding that part of myself. To me, remote learning has been a blessing — being able to find myself more.”

Putting on a performance

Leo Street, a freshman at Davidson Community College, has never known college fully in-person.

Street, who is nonbinary and transgender, went from being home-schooled their entire life to a hybrid learning model at Davidson this past year — which has allowed Street some extra time to adjust but also given them more anxiety about what’ll happen when classrooms are completely open.

“My family is full of neurodiverse and queer people. Only one of us siblings are cisgender and straight,” they said. “So college has taken a big toll on my mental health. I feel like I have to put on a performance, almost.”

Street said they feel they have to pretend they’re cisgender, instead of transgender, just to become more acceptable to others. Street uses gender-neutral pronouns — they and them — but is sometimes misgendered.

“It’s emotionally exhausting,” they said. “It adds a whole layer on stress on top of already stressful coursework — constantly thinking about how I appear and how others think about me.”

Yusuf is familiar with that mental toll.

She started college presenting as a masculine queer person and criminal justice major. But after coming out, she didn’t feel as comfortable in her major’s classes, dominated by mostly white, cisgender men. They passive aggressively questioned her in class, and university faculty asked ignorant questions about her religion, Islam.

“It was really tiring to constantly have to be the person to have to correct professors in some cases,” Yusuf said. “Actually, that means this. Hijabs aren’t oppressive. Things like that.”

She said she constantly felt like she had to defend herself.

UNCC’s Office of Identity, Equity, and Engagement offers faculty and staff training on LGBTQ+ terminology and experiences, according to a statement provided to the Charlotte Observer from communications director Buffie Stephens. The statement also says students in need of support should seek assistance from University resources.

“I think that as much as the school may be trying to be inclusive of queer students, campus culture among the student body just isn’t catching up,” Yusuf said. “The university needs to put a lot more effort into making their support of queer students visible, so that we can feel as proud to be students as we are to be LGBTQ+.”

She’s chosen to not re-enroll at UNCC in favor of attending UNC Asheville, where Yusuf thinks her presence will be more accepted. She’ll be studying sociology.

“The only reason I stuck around was virtual learning,” she said. “That’s not an environment I feel safe going back to.

“I don’t want to tire myself out with validating my existence every 30 seconds.”