Struggle and resilience: Lessons from the class of 2021
When sports practices were abruptly canceled at his high school on March 12, 2020, Michael Liao, then a junior, started to worry how much the pandemic would affect his school – and particularly his upcoming theater performance. The next morning, he woke to an email announcing that in-person classes would be canceled for the foreseeable future.
By mid-April, the world had changed.
Jaden Huynh, then a sophomore at Arvada West High School in a suburb northwest of Denver, was confronting the new reality, too. One night she circled the dinner table plating goi – a Vietnamese salad – and spring rolls for her family’s Easter dinner and silently counted all the empty seats for cousins and extended relatives who weren’t coming.
Colorado’s lockdown had been in place for months when Michael’s classmate, Mana Setayesh, a rising senior at Peak to Peak Charter School in Lafayette, a half-hour north of Denver, sat stunned when her doctor told her a high school swimming star had come down with COVID-19 and could no longer attend college. Would her future get derailed as well?
All three planned to graduate at the end of the 2020-21 school year. But as the pandemic raged, unabated, each quietly realized their senior year could end far differently than they expected. The months of disruption continued for Michael, Jaden, Mana, and the 3.7 million other teenagers preparing for a triumphant final year of high school in the United States.
“You don’t get a second chance at 12th grade,” Michael says. “This is it. This is the hand we were dealt.”
Stuck at home, these students saw their future threatened by an unpredictable and deadly virus that upended the economy and possibly their hopes for college. They watched as the police killing of a Black man in Minneapolis reignited the country’s fight for racial and social justice. And they lived through perhaps the most divisive presidential battle in American history. This chaotic year is now the foundation for these young people’s transition to adulthood.
As a new school year begins – alongside a fourth wave
