Senior appreciation: Let’s hear it for those chronicling how 2020 will be remembered
Hannah Huyett broke a finger just before volleyball season in her junior year at Turner High. She responded by volunteering to be the manager for a team that lost all of its conference games.
So you’re darned right she’s up for one of the strangest jobs a high school kid can have right now: finishing a yearbook commemorating a time that seemed so normal, and then so quickly and comprehensively went off the rails.
Actually, she’s well equipped for this, and not just because she has the smarts and drive to be class valedictorian, a three-sport varsity athlete and her school’s yearbook editor. She and her staff may have picked the perfect theme, even before they knew how perfect it would be:
The Roaring ‘20s.
“We’re starting a new decade,” she said. “The 1920s was a time of resilience, and I feel like we’re doing that again now.”
The Kansas City metro area includes more than 100 high schools and many more junior highs, middle schools and elementary schools. All are dealing with a similar challenge: how to chronicle a school year that ended too soon, for reasons outside of anyone’s control.
The process has forced creativity, and in some instances humor. One of Turner High’s new COVID-19 pages is titled, “What do you mean they’re out of toilet paper?”
Raymore-Peculiar High has nearly 2,000 students and produces a 296-page yearbook. They had to rip up around 40 of those pages that were planned to honor spring sports seasons and activities.
They’ll still honor those teams and kids, just in different ways. Six seniors won medals at the state track meet last year and will never have the chance to do so again. The boys cross country team won a state championship in the fall, setting the track team up for a title run that won’t happen. The baseball team did fundraising for new uniforms that won’t be worn.
The Raymore-Peculiar yearbook’s pages include a timeline of the virus’ spread stories about students’ efforts to spread positivity and how teachers adjusted to online learning.
Yearbooks are meant to be signed by your friends, but who knows when that can happen? Yearbooks are also meant to be looked at again in five years, 10 years, 20 — and when’s the last time a yearbook would generate this much interest?
“I’ll definitely tell my kids about this,” said Kenzi Jones, the yearbook editor at Ray-Pec. “I missed out on so many things. So many things I wanted to do and experience that I can’t.”
We’ve all lost something through the pandemic. For the fortunate, the loss has been measured in concerts, travel, organized sports and meals at a restaurant. For too many others, the loss has been tragic.
For all of us, the loss has included normalcy. Few feel that more personally than high school seniors, particularly those involved in spring sports, and even more so for those in charge of memorializing it all.
Huyett is at the intersection of all these things, a diligent student who will take some 24 hours of college credit to K-State as an architectural engineering major.
Turner’s yearbook — and most schools across the area and country are like this — is in good hands. Huyett is the kind of kid who starts her schoolwork every morning after breakfast, in the order of a class schedule she no longer has to follow, and then spends the rest of the day reading or drawing or playing outside with her little brother.
The Turner volleyball team won just two matches this season and basketball went winless for the second year in a row. Huyett is tough to break, is the point, so finishing a yearbook and school year from home is more of a new challenge than a depressing new reality.
“It sucks not to win a game at all your senior season,” Huyett said. “But those girls are my family. I would never consider leaving them just simply because we didn’t win a game. Because other things happen, too. We all improve, we all grow closer. And to be there for the underclassmen, because hopefully in the years that come they will win a game.”
Huyett’s mother started crying inside of 30 seconds when talking about her daughter. Stefani Russ, Jones’ journalism teacher, spoke over the phone, but I swear I could hear her shaking her head: “Nothing short of amazing for an 18-year-old kid to accomplish.”
Some editorializing: Stories have poured in from all over Kansas City and beyond about how people are coping. Some are heartbreaking, some happy. Some are scary, some funny.
Some of the most consistently inspirational come from and about high school students. I don’t know why that is. Maybe they don’t know any better. Maybe it’s easier to be determined instead of scared without the responsibility of a mortgage payment, or the “essential job” that only might be essential.
Maybe it’s easier to be optimistic when you’re young, when the mistakes aren’t yet yours and there’s nothing but possibility in front of you.
Whatever it is, these stories are worth recognizing. These outlooks are worth emulating.