A year and six months ago today a pandemic called CoronaVirus-19 hit the world. This virus lead to schools, shopping centers, restaurants, athletic fields, and even airports to close. Thousands of people were dying every day and no one could do anything because it was a brand new virus with no vaccine or antidote. It was like a ghost town, the thought of leaving your house was terrifying. When schools shut down learning changed and went online. The textbooks, tests, and homework were online. Zoom became a huge part of everyone’s daily lives when it came to meetings. Until it was safer to come back on campus.

In March of 2021, a year from when it all started,  schools in LA county started doing hybrid, but of course, this was not the same experience you would get in a normal pre-Covid school year. That is when it was announced that we were able to come back to school as long as we wore our masks. However, along with letting about 2,600 students on campus again in classrooms, there would be restrictions to go with it, for example: wearing masks inside and outside, no rallies inside the gym, dances have to be outside, you can no longer buy tickets upfront for sports events, only online, to play sports you have to be either vaccinated or tested for Covid, the list goes on.

To learn more about how the students of California High School feel about this I asked Owen Luna, a sophomore, what changes he has noticed when coming back to an on-campus school. “I used to be able to do so many things, like play basketball without having to worry about getting infected and even at the dance when you had to have a vaccination card or a negative test to be able to go and the difference now is testing is a big thing these days.”

Additionally, along with students I also wanted to get the opinion of a teacher, I asked Mrs. Davies, a Puente English teacher to give her thoughts and feelings as a teacher coming back to work in person. “I’ve given up paper for the most part and all my planning and most of my assignments are on Google Classroom, but it is very satisfying to be able to be in class and explain it to the kids. But I think from now on most teachers will be doing electronic planning and posting.”

It is clear to see that this will not be an easy transition for most but it’s worth it. It is good to be back Condors!