Dear parents and staff: the return to school will be postponed to April 3, 2020, due to COVID-19. That was the email families received on March 15, 2020. Little did students, parents and teachers know, that would be the last week spent in school without masks.

Many students were still in school when districts across the nation began to close. For local students, spring break had just gotten longer.

“My family decided to go to Mexico for spring break,” sophomore Aliana Hogan said. “I was excited when I found out we weren’t going back to school. I was on vacation and I would have a longer one now.”

While schools, business and traveling were closing day by day, relief of not going back started to set in once the cases began to increase.

“I was at home, reading about everything that was happening and I was relieved we weren’t going back,” Spanish teacher Kimberly Gryseels said. “ It was a scary time, and we didn’t know much about the virus.”

A year ago would be the first time students knew what online school would be like and how it would impact them.

“The work I was assigned was easy to do,” Hogan said. “Since there wasn’t a lot being assigned it was not a pain to finish.”

Not only did students have to adapt to working online, but teachers also had to change the majority of their assignments to be functional with the online process.

“Virtual teaching was not and is still not as good as in-person classes,” Gryseels said. “At the time it was all that we had, so everyone made the best of it and tried to do what they could.”

A year ago students around the nation would be celebrating a longer spring break. Now students are looking forward to a break from school and masks.