Recently, it has been announced that COVID-19 cases and/or symptoms have already shown up at our school after only having hybrid learning for ten solid school days.

Just this past week, Principal Rachael Ayers sent out a Google Doc stating, “To this end, we are writing to share that a person at Mead High School has been diagnosed with COVID-19 or is exhibiting symptoms of COVID-19.”

This confirmed many worries. With this new information, it is clear that in person learning is not a safe environment during a global pandemic for the students, teachers, and staff involved.

Public schools need to take more action on student safety during these times. As shown in the hallways of schools across the nation, it is impossible to enforce social distancing and the keeping on of masks during school hours. Instead of exposing kids to a deadly disease in the middle of flu season and without enforced precautions, we need to stay home where it’s safe and where we can do our part to stop this virus as quickly as possible.

A perfect example of this is high school sports. People are touching, hugging, and getting close to each other during practices without any masks on. It’s impossible to expect sports like soccer and football to be socially distanced during practice. And yet, we still returned to school, even when knowing this.

Additionally, grades are a big concern for people with hybrid learning. It’s difficult to go back and forth from emailing to talking, from seeing teachers to sending them a WebEx chat, and it’s caused a huge academic toll on students. 

We either need to return to remote learning or stop giving mountains of homework to students on days where they can’t even ask questions or get clarification on their assignments. There’s always going to be technology problems, but when we use the internet for all our work, there’s bound to be significantly more issues. This could lead to the decrease in grades and GPAs. It’d be much easier for students to be given less work to lower the technology problems. 

On Fridays we have all eight of our classes during one day, and all our stuff is due at 2:45 p.m., sometimes even 2:15 p.m. How is it expected that we can get everything in and still do a good job on it by that time? Is that when our homework is usually due? No, it’s not.

It’s not okay that the standards for schoolwork have risen while we’re in the middle of a global pandemic. There’s bound to be issues and stumbles—why are we returning to hybrid now of all times? 

Schools need to acknowledge that every student is experiencing a genuine global pandemic during one of the hardest times of their lives right now. A lot of high school students are clinically depressed, while others can barely get out of bed in the morning. They use school as an escape from their life. How can we do that while keeping others safe? The answer is simple—right now, it’s just not possible. No one is safe.

Being quarantined over the summer didn’t help anyone with their mental stability. Adding more social stresses and medical stresses to that through hybrid learning won’t either.

If we want this pandemic to be over, we need to close down everything that we possibly can and completely quarantine.

200,000 Americans are dead. Why is this still up for debate?

We’ve tried to go back to partially in-person schooling, and it hasn’t worked. If there’s already a case and people are showing Coronavirus symptoms, we should end it at one case instead of waiting until there are too many to manage. We need to end this COVID-19 cycle once and for all.