Today marks the fifth anniversary of the day when schools across Connecticut and the United States shut their doors due to the COVID-19 pandemic, bringing on months of masking, social distancing, and remote learning. We asked our staff to share their memories from March 13, 2020, and the days and months that followed.
I remember it like it was yesterday. My Dad and I were at the Crystal Mall, when it still actually had stores, and he got a notification on his phone, saying we had two weeks off. By this point, we were all aware of COVID, but were not sure of its full impact. I figured it was just going to pass by like other epidemics similar to the Triple E virus. But boy was I wrong. Those two weeks slowly turned into a month, then two months, then “until further notice.” For a year and a half, an entire generation lost the ability to properly socialize, and I feel like that is one of the main effects that still lasts to this day.
Something I will always remember is the last day of in-person 4th grade. I had absolutely no idea about the ongoing spread of COVID-19 until my friends and teachers mentioned being off from school for two weeks. I heard all these rumors; two weeks off, two days off a week, even going fully online. Until I got home on the unknowingly last day of in-person school. During quarantine, I was in my prime. Staying up till midnight playing Roblox and FaceTiming friends, then wearing masks everywhere I went.
When I was 9 years old my family decided to go on a trip to Jamaica. We ended up going to Jamaica the week before Quarantine was announced. We thought we would be stuck in Jamaica and no one was complaining because who doesn’t wanna be stuck in Jamaica for a couple of weeks? We ended up being able to go home and those two weeks turned into a year. I hated. Like everyone else, I learned online, which basically caused me to lose an entire school year.
One of the most memorable experiences during the pandemic was distance learning. I was at home with my brother and dad. I ended up spending much more time with these people and connected with them more deeply. My dad saw distance learning as a way to educate me further. He called himself the “principal.” My brother and I spend hours creating made-up games. A negative aspect would be the loss of social “face-to-face” experience. During the pandemic, my mom would urge me to use Messenger Kids to stay in contact with my friends. I wanted to communicate with them in person, not on a low-quality audio and camera.
One of my most memorable experiences from the pandemic wasn’t a specific moment but it was something that has guided me down a path that I hope to continue. That experience was watching the news. Though many people may take it for granted, I realized that becoming informed about current issues, especially during a worldwide pandemic, was super important. My parents and I would watch the news every morning and night and it helped me connect with the wider world even though everyone was isolated in their homes. Watching the news is a very common practice, but it inspired me to continue my journey of not only reading and watching the news but also writing it.
One of the things I remember the most was, that my sister, my brother, and my mom all had Zoom meetings at the same time and it was so funny because we all had Zoom and our WiFi went out. My sister and I also had dance classes on Zoom. Those were bad. We had to do our recital in masks. That was so bad. It was hot and sweaty and hard to breathe plus our makeup got all over the mask.
Initially, I was very excited. All I knew was that my friends and I were indefinitely getting two weeks off of school. I was too young to know what was fully going on or going to happen in the future. I was ten years old and attending Cutler Middle School. Excitement soon turned into sadness, as before I knew it, my dad was driving me to Cutler so that I could clean out my locker that I would never return to. I didn’t know it, but the last day before my parents told me about the two weeks off, would be the last time students ever attended Cutler Middle School. It was demolished during the pandemic. When I attended Groton Middle School for my seventh and eighth-grade years, I really disliked it. The school was not big enough for the amount of students and we were all isolated behind disposable masks. On the flip side, I was fortunate enough to experience the rare privilege of the height of the pandemic being one of the healthiest points in my life. I was outside almost every day. Riding my bike, going to the beach, and embarking on hikes. I was still able to see my family and friends, all outside of course. I was fortunate enough to just be a naive little kid who was now forced to play outside.
As a seventh grader at Cutler Middle School, being told that we would be getting two weeks off from school was exciting news. I was at my friend’s house for her birthday when I found out. I remember the news anchor on the TV stating that schools would be closed for the next two weeks. I wasn’t really aware of the pandemic that was starting to spread, all I knew was that I wouldn’t have any schoolwork to do. However, as time passed and two weeks turned into the rest of the year being online my life really changed. Online school was a new concept for me and though I still maintained my good grades, not being able to see my friends all the time or learn in person from my teachers was difficult. Especially during eighth grade when I returned to in-person learning at Groton Middle School, online school had turned me into an introverted person. However, since then I have become my extroverted self again and I can say there were positive experiences during quarantine. My family went on many drives around town, tons of hikes, and bike rides with some of my friends. I also became more artistic and learned new skills like sewing. Overall, looking back now it has been five years, it was a crazy time that created a lot of chaos but also learning opportunities.
I remember going to school on Thursday, March 12th, 2020, and asking my 7th-grade social studies teacher what would happen if there was a lockdown for COVID-19. I asked if they would distribute Chromebooks to students who needed them, and she said yes and that if we did go into lockdown, it would only be for a time frame of a few weeks to a couple of months. I remember in my head thinking that we would get a few days’ notice if that was going to happen so the school could make sure everyone had a Chromebook. Later that day, I was playing Minecraft on a call with three friends the moment we found out that school would be canceled for two weeks. Immediately I was pretty excited, knowing that the three-day weekend we had would become a two-week break and that I would get to play a lot of “Minecraft,” which I ultimately did. Between my little brother being born in May 2020, obsessing over the news, playing video games, and time blending, the entire world felt different and unlike what it had been before. It still feels like time is wonky, that the year is still 2020, when in reality it has been half a decade, and I am now a senior in high school graduating this June.
I was in seventh-grade art class when our teacher began discussing the possibility of a lockdown that would last around two weeks. This was after there was a lot of panic in the media and among health officials surrounding the surprising rise and spread of COVID cases (or as we called it, coronavirus). I personally didn’t really understand the full scope of the problem until lockdown actually came into effect. The lockdowns themselves at first felt fun and different as you could just stay home all day and school was more or less informal. Zoom wasn’t popularized and teachers didn’t know how to really assign stuff on Google Classroom so school became optional for the most part. However as the months went by, it became less fun and more boring. There was nothing to do and you had to stay in the house for the entire day. You couldn’t even go outside cause there was nowhere to go! It’s quite crazy to think it’s been five years since lockdown began. I’m about to go to college now and COVID feels like a quite distant and hazy memory now. It feels crazier that most people in this school experienced lockdown when they were in elementary school which doesn’t feel right at all. I was 12 when lockdown started and now that I’m 17 I feel like I have gained a lot of knowledge since then and lots has changed overall in my life and in the environment around us.
When I think of fourth grade I immediately think of covid. Back then I still had no idea what covid was so I can remember my mom telling me that I was going to have two weeks off of school and I didn’t really know why. For the whole two weeks, my sister was salty that her special 13th birthday would be ruined. I personally was excited because who doesn’t want a two-week vacation, but as those two weeks turned into two years of distance learning I remember regretting how quickly I had decided I wanted two weeks off.
Before COVID caused schools to shut down, I somewhat have memories of my elementary school telling the students to wash their hands for 20 seconds and to wash them properly. I remember when the schools shut down, I was at my mom’s house when she got the call saying that they would be closed for 2 weeks before those two weeks would’ve gone for an (at the time) indefinite amount of time. I would play “Animal Crossing: New Horizons” all the time while stuck in my house, I would also play and talk to my friends and family who had New Horizons and would visit their islands. I also remember that during the first year of COVID, my grandfather on my dad’s side died that year, not because of COVID but because of other health reasons, I traveled from Connecticut to Florida with my dad’s side of my family to see my grandmother to keep her company at the time, and she moved back to Connecticut to live with me and my dad for a while. COVID also affected my first year of middle school, online 3 days a week and in-person 2 days a week. My sixth-grade year was the year where I didn’t do well in school, getting low grades in multiple classes and my parents suspected it was because of virtual learning.
I vividly remember the day that school was canceled for two weeks, which turned into a month, which turned into an indefinite amount of time. Those days blurred together so much for me, yet so much happened. I played a lot of video games to escape and I tried in school but it just got harder and harder to care at all. I tried to get outside, take walks, and call friends, but I was still lonely and honestly depressed. There are small things I remember fondly. Playing “Animal Crossing” and getting every moon in “Mario Odyssey,” birdwatching and having bonfires with my family, and discovering new music. But mostly I remember how strenuous things were on my mental health at that time.
