PHOTO: Oak Hill Middle School Facebook photo
By Jocelyn Davis
I am a student at Oak Hill Middle School who is returning to public education after 18 months of not having traditional schooling. I have started noticing how much life has changed after this virus wreaked havoc upon daily life. It changed not only the way we think, but also act. I interviewed fellow students because I wanted to see if anyone was affected by COVID like I had been. This is what I found.
The people who took part in this interview were PJ Smith and Ella Martin, from the eighth grade; Joseph Greenwood and Temperance Trepanier, from the seventh grade; Sixth-grade girl Reese Marquis and fifth-grade girl Alex Gauthier. I also talked to a couple of students who preferred to remain anonymous.
The first question I asked was how COVID affected them as a person.
Ella said, “Well, not really personally, but my family members have gotten COVID, so I know it’s affected them, it has ‘ruined my cousin’s life’, he says, because he’s not able to go anywhere.”
PJ said, “A lot of my sports have gotten canceled and school has been weird, and everything has been kind of dumb.”
Cancelation of sports and after-school activities affected many students throughout Regional School Unit 4, especially the seniors graduating in 2020, who weren’t able to partake in their last year of activities.
Reese’s answer reflected that. “It’s affected me different ways, like I used to do dance and it would be really fun because I have a bunch of friends I can’t see in school, but once COVID happened, they had to shut down…and I haven’t been able to see my friends at all, and I went through a bit of depression at the time.”
I then asked if they thought they missed any important subjects during COVID.
“Probably,” Temperance said. “Because I know that we’ve had to move back and do things we’re not supposed to be doing in seventh grade.”
A fifth-grade boy, who asked to remain anonymous, said, “Yeah, some of my band maybe, cause I do drums, and I miss band sometimes.”
Joseph, though, felt he hadn’t missed out on any important subjects in school.
Next, I asked them all if they would rather be in person at school or learn remotely. While most said they would rather be in school, two responses stood out.
The fifth-grader told me, “Remote, so that we would have less of a chance of getting COVID.” He was the only one I interviewed with this opinion.
Alex said she’d rather be in school. ”Because out of school was really stressful for me. Like with assignments, because in class you just get stuff done and you might get homework, but with remote, it’s like there’s stuff that you have to do at your house, but you’re there doing schoolwork instead.”
Almost every student I interviewed had strong arguments for in-person education, all happy to be in school once more.
Next, I asked if they were worried about their families throughout COVID.
“Yeah, ‘cause like it could kill them and stuff, that’s kinda scary,” PJ said.
But Joseph said, “Not really, we’re all vaccinated, I was the last one to get it because I’m the youngest.”
Ella’s perspective came from the fact her mother works in health care. “If somebody at her office gets COVID, she’d have to quarantine and I would probably as well, so yeah, I’m really worried about my family.”
I also asked them if they felt COVID had affected their education.
Reese and Temperance both said it had. “A lot,” Trepanier said.
Alex said it had “in some ways.”
“At home, you don’t really get to do as much stuff that you would do in class, you just sit there and put on a screen the whole time,” she said.
I asked them if school was a happy healthy place despite COVID.
PJ said it wasn’t. “A lot of people are like, negative about the masks and all that stuff.”
Ella said, “Well, I wouldn’t say happy for some people, for the most part yeah, there’s still fights at school. It’s pretty much the same as it was before.”
The others said it was. Alex, smiling, even said it was fun.
During the pandemic, students attended two days a week in a nine-person bubble. When I asked how they liked being back in school five days a week, the answers varied.
“It’s a lot better than like, the two days we were doing before, ‘cause you actually get to learn a subject instead of doing it two days at a time,” Smith said.
“It feels awesome to be back with friends five days a week,” Marquis said, with a large smile.
“It’s good, I really like it,” Alex said.
When I asked about their mental health, many smiles faltered and things got more personal. Many people went through rocky mental health paths throughout COVID, and it has greatly affected the student body.
“It’s not the best,” Martin said. “I definitely got isolated last year, either that or I would be on Xbox six hours a day, which is a bad addiction.”
Greenwood said it’s “definitely been different, talking to people.”
“Where we hadn’t done it in a long time,” he said. “Then you finally get back to school, like last year, just not talking to people like, two days a week and then you go back on Monday and it’s kind of like, ‘Why are there people here?’” he joked.
When I asked if they missed being split into two cohorts (only going to school two days a week with only nine other students all day long), everyone said they did not.
Virtual snow days, an “improvement” spurred by COVID, weren’t popular with the group.
“I don’t like virtual snow days,” Smith said. “I like my snow days, being able to sleep in and not having to do anything.”
“I liked snow days,” Martin said. “I think if we just got a packet of work handed to us that we could fill out instead of having to go to an individual class that would have been a lot better than virtual snow days, ‘cause I love my snow days.”
COVID has affected every part of daily life and now we’re seeing how it has affected schooling and children in the school system. This is our new life and now you see how it has affected the OHMS student body. Not only has it changed the way we are educated, but sometimes negatively affected our mental health. It has had an overall negative impact on the community and schools throughout RSU4.
In conclusion, I found that I was not alone in this. Quite a lot of the students were affected by COVID like I had been. It not only changed their lives but how they acted and thought.
Editor’s note: Jocelyn Davis is a seventh-grade student at Oak Hill Middle School. Her humanities teacher, Aimee Lanteigne, suggested she write this article, to share how COVID-19 has affected students.
