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Collected Item: “Official School Shutdown”

Give your story a title.

Official School Shutdown

What sort of object is this: text story, photograph, video, audio interview, screenshot, drawing, meme, etc.?

a text story

Tell us a story; share your experience. Describe what the object or story you've uploaded says about the pandemic, and/or why what you've submitted is important to you.

I first knew this when one of my friends texted me.
She told me to check my email and when I did, the screenshot above told us that we were not going to go back to school until after Spring Break.
It was a Friday and it didn’t occur to me that we would have online school. So I just assumed that we had no school at all, like an extended break.
However, we got some more follow up emails saying how we still had to do classwork and such. (This is when I started checking my email daily)
Back then, I had limited access to technology and I didn’t want to bother my parents too much; so I had to work with what I had.
But then the date kept changing. It was extended to May, then to the rest of the school year. And the first half of this year.
It was extremely distracting to learn from home, it felt like my siblings became ten times more annoying, we had to be more careful with cleaning/sanitizing and had to store more food/supplies.
I didn’t leave the house for a couple of months and I barely talked to my friends.
I did get to try more home cooked meals and it was easier to prepare in the morning.
Many political and racial things began happening like getting justice for hate crimes (ex: BLM protests) and unfairness from police officers became relevant.
When George Floyd got murdered, it caused a bit of controversy between my family and I, specifically my mom.
My mom claimed that he was a criminal so she said the police officer was just doing his job; while I said that it still wasn't right. We kind of ignore that topic now..
A new president was also nominated and it was the first time people had to mail in votes.
The new president wasn't official until two weeks after counting the votes.
There were people that raided the White House and the 45th president of the USA got banned from many social media platforms. Since he was upset about not being president again and sort of hinted at people attacking the capital. Many people hate and like this man. Mostly hate.
After about a year, scientists and doctors were able to create a vaccine that successfully blocked out covid. So many people are getting vaccinated and the public is beginning to reopen.
Going to school in-person (late March 2021) had less distractions and I’m actually learning.
We're still doing safety precautions and lots of sanitizing.

Use one-word hashtags (separated by commas) to describe your story. For example: Where did it originate? How does this object make you feel? How does this object relate to the pandemic?

#quarantine, #onlineschool, #distracted, #socialdistancing, # BLM, #stayhome, #voting2021, #covidvaccine

Who originally created this object? (If you created this object, such as photo, then put "self" here.)

Me (Patricia Vu)

Give this story a date.

2020-03-13
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