Pinellas grads take lessons from a high school life that began with COVID

Seminole High senior Emily Nichols has vivid memories of the school’s 2020 drive-by graduation.

Nichols — then just finishing eighth grade — sat in the passenger seat beside her older sister, whose in-person commencement ceremony was waylaid by the COVID-19 pandemic that cropped up only weeks earlier.

“She was devastated,” Nichols said of her sister, who had regaled her with stories about how great high school was. “It was so anticlimactic.”

Still, as she entered Seminole, Nichols remained enthusiastic.

“I actually was expecting a lot,” she recalled. “I was expecting it to be really upbeat. I was going to make a lot of friends.”

What really happened was quite different. The class of 2024 began its high school experience masked and distanced, with many students taking classes remotely and many others frequently sent home under quarantine.

They had few, if any, club meetings, dances, sporting activities or other events that usually bring a class together. Learning also proved tough, Seminole senior Kylie Boone recalled, with teachers trying to hold students’ attention in the classroom and remotely at the same time, often to ill effect.

“I only did it a few times, but I would turn it on and walk away from my computer,” classmate Lily Dixon admitted about taking classes remotely for a year. “Not my best moment.”

Nichols, Boone and Dixon worked to document it all in the school news magazine and yearbook. And they’ve been keeping track ever since.

Top editors for the school publications, the three reflected on how far things have progressed and the lessons they learned along the way, as they completed their final exams and prepared for their own Thursday morning graduation. It was the second of 26 commencement celebrations scheduled to take place over the next week and a half in Pinellas.

It was journalism class that made freshman year bearable, the Seminole students said.

In other classes, “no one wanted to talk. You couldn’t see who anyone was,” Nichols recalled. “It was very awkward. It was very hard to make friends.”

But journalism teacher Candace Gilbert required everyone to participate. And in gathering information for stories about how everyone was coping with the pandemic, they quickly came to learn about making changes on the fly, fixing what appeared to be intractable problems and getting to the heart of what’s important when so many distractions existed.

No clubs meeting? Write about individuals and their interests. That individual didn’t show up for a photo shoot because of quarantine? Find an alternate way to illustrate, or consider rescheduling so long as you don’t break deadline.

They had to rethink the nature of their work.

“So many things we’ve had to adapt to,” Boone said.

“It’s not like, I didn’t get it and it’s blank,” Dixon added. “You go and you figure it out and you make it as close to perfect as you can.”

By the time sophomore year rolled around, they found they could do stories about hot mask trends only so many times. But luckily for everyone, the pandemic rules were fading, and the activities that define high school had returned.

“Sophomore year was more like the high school I expected when I came in,” Dixon said.

“I remember going to every football game that year,” Nichols added.

“It was the freshman year we missed out on,” Dixon responded.

People got to a point where they had to move on. And the school magazine and yearbook had to shift along with them.

Stories and spreads stuck closely to what was happening in the school, shedding many of the items on national trends and issues. As a result, Nichols said, “people are a lot more into the (publications) than they used to be.”

Ideas kept coming as activities grew and students wanted to know what was happening around them. Campus clubs helped make sure the magazine and yearbook remained in print.

Even as the dances and parties and other events returned, though, participation wasn’t as strong as in the past. The annual Battle of the Classes, for instance, had only about half the number of students involved as before the pandemic. Journalism teacher Gilbert pointed that out to the girls who chronicled it, but couldn’t know the history.

They simply referred to it as the new normal. And they were excited about the chance to have Senior Sunset on the stadium field, where everyone could mingle and celebrate “one last hurrah” together before getting their diplomas and calling it a high school career.

If anything, they were a bit jealous of the current crop of ninth graders, who got to have the type of freshman year they had hoped for.

“But I did have a high school experience,” Dixon said,.

One with a real graduation.

“I’m looking forward to it,” Nichols said.