Back to a different world

ALIEF HASTINGS HIGH SCHOOL

VOL. 49 ISSUE #1

Students gather in the courtyard before school begins on a September morning. The courtyard between the north and south buildings is one of the designated locations for students to spend time before the first bell.

Photo by Juanita Omeje

By Juanita Omeje

Walking through the courtyard of Hastings High School in the morning, one is surrounded by the din of voices and hysterical laughter. This is a sound that for some, still takes time getting used to.

For Alief area schools, buzz and chatter has been long in coming. Following the outbreak of the Coronavirus in late 2019 and its rapid growth in Texas beginning March 2020, schools in Houston and all over Alief closed down to combat the virus, which is highly contagious and can spread rapidly through the nose and mouth. Due to its severity, schools did not reopen for the rest of the 20192020 school year, or even for much of the 2020-2021 school year. During this time, students had to attend school remotely through video calls.

This past August marked the beginning of the first truly in-person school year in almost two years. “It feels good [to be back],” junior Jessica Hernandez said. “I like in-person more...online you could get easily distracted.”

But although the spread of the disease has flattened since its beginning, its presence is still felt. Since the first day of the school year, Alief ISD has kept track of how many new cases have been reported in the district by students and staff--including breakdowns per week and by school--on a webpage known as the Alief COVID Dashboard. Currently, the district cases sit at a total of 1,336 since the beginning of the school year. Cases are especially rising in Hastings, which has reported a total of 111 cases since school began, a higher number than any other school in the district.

Given these facts, there has been talk of another potential district-wide school shutdown and a return to online schooling. This possibility has generated mixed reviews from students. Hernandez, for one, would be okay with that possibility. “It’s for our safety,” she said. “Freshman Ruth Tucho was ambivalent about the matter, saying she “wouldn’t really mind”. “But I feel like some things would change,” she added. “The way you interact with people [would change] because you’d get used to not seeing them for a while.”

Others, however, are strongly opposed to the idea. “I would be pissed,” said Zainab Shodeke, a senior. “I don’t want them to go back to online… it’s like setting us up for failure. Even being in person, I know that’s also bad because of the virus, but how about they make it mandatory for all the kids to wear their masks?”

Shodeke asks a relevant question. Currently, Alief as part of its Safe Return to School Plan has put in place precautions for all schools, such as regular hand washing, the use of hand sanitizer “after all common contacts”, and refraining from attending school when sick.

But in all this it states that face coverings, although encouraged, are not a requirement due to prohibition by the Texas governor.

According to Shodeke, the lack of a mask mandate could be a large contributor to the rising cases. “Every time I walk down this hallway, I see everybody’s not wearing their masks, and you could hear them coughing, sneezing, all that stuff and they don’t have their mask on. You don’t know what they have,” she said. “First [off]...what they should do is with the mask.... they have to make sure everybody’s wearing their mask like they used to.” She believes it doesn’t matter whether or not you’re vaccinated. “I’m vaccinated and I’ve still got my mask on.”

Only about a month and a half into the school year, about 2% of students have caught the virus. Since sick students must stay home from school, there have been cases where students have been absent from school for weeks at a time. For Hernandez, who was quarantined in her room for two weeks because of COVID, the time was not too bad. “I didn’t have any bad symptoms, just cough, runny nose...over that time I was able to do [school]work,” she said. “I didn’t really feel behind [when I came back].”

There’s still a great possibility that Alief ISD schools could close down once more.

But for now, the laughter and chatter that can be heard in the courtyard, cafeterias, and hallways show that students are enjoying being back in school, Coronavirus or not.