No More Excuses!

March 2020 was a defining month in many of our lives as it was when Covid-19 changed everything. School was pushed online and suddenly all anyone was talking about was this new pandemic. A disease that had spread across the world, causing everyone to social distance and move their lives online.
We thought we would be doing classes online for only a few weeks, and then a few weeks became a month. Then that month became the rest of the school year. We thought the 2020-21 school year would be okay though. Then Covid said nope! School was online for almost the entirety of that school year, too.
With online school, the effort put in by students decreased. It didn’t seem worth it to put in real work while we were stuck behind computer screens. Especially for students who were in high school while school was online. The expectations were lowered, the bar dropped.
Teachers were required to pass students that ordinary would have failed because too many failing students would make the school look bad. It became very easy for teachers to accept minimal work.
Now, four years later, we cannot accept mediocrity anymore.
This year, there are no longer any students at Highland who were in high school when classes were online. This year’s seniors were in eighth grade during the online year. Our freshman year was masked—but in-person. We didn’t experience high school online.
This means that using online school as an excuse isn’t valid anymore. Habits we formed during Covid when everything was online need to be broken. Laziness can’t be accepted anymore; we can’t keep using it as an excuse to spend all our time online and avoid people.
Covid has been dragged out as an excuse hundreds of times since it first impacted our lives in 2020, but that was four and a half years ago. The pandemic was declared over in May of 2023, the 2023-24 school year was the first normal year since Covid. Using Covid as an excuse now, so close to 2025, isn’t reasonable anymore.
This year, Highland is no longer getting Covid relief funding from the federal government. As part of the CARES Act, the school received about a quarter million dollars per year for the past four school years in the form of ESSER funds.
According to Highland principal Jeremy Chatterton, the funding that the school received paid for about three teachers. This allowed the school to keep class sizes smaller post-Covid. Because of the loss of funding, Highland can’t afford as many teachers which led to class sizes being larger.
This loss of federal funding is a sign that Covid is something that’s in the past. The virus is still around but it has become less dangerous and is more like the common cold.
I think I can speak for most people when I say that most of us don’t think about Covid-19 or the pandemic on a daily basis anymore. But it still inadvertently affects our lives in many ways; whether it’s the new prevalence of social media or a new fear of coughing in public.
Since Covid, taking your college classes online has increased drastically in popularity. According to a study done by Forbes, in 2012 only 12.4% of college students did their courses entirely online. But in 2022, 26% of college students were entirely online. The rise in popularity is because of the pandemic. Many more use a hybrid schedule for their classes, taking some online and others in-person.
Overall, the Covid-19 pandemic is something that’s in the past. And that means that while life is different now than it was pre-Covid, that doesn’t mean that it’s a good excuse to not work hard. If we’ve returned to normal in our social lives—going out with friends after school, going to school unmasked, etcetera—we can return to the level of work that was expected prior to the pandemic.
Old habits need to be broken, and new ones formed. We’ve overcome the obstacle, it’s time to stop looking back. There are so many possibilities out there, stop letting the memory of the pandemic hold you back.