Part IV (December 2020-May 2021)

2020 ended and 2021 began with the promise of vaccines. On February 16th, students returned to school in alphabetical cohorts after weeks of distance learning. As spring began, students were able to return to a somewhat normal schedule: four days of in-person learning with asynchronous Wednesdays.

Stein: “So my best experience is right here. This is a Lego set that was purchased for my kids and me during that second pause from November through the holidays, and so this Lego set was put together by my three daughters and myself. So this was our little family project that we worked on during any downtime. [When] we were done, my wife was like ‘what are you gonna do with it?’ [I said,] ‘I don’t know. I’ll get it out of the house, so I’ll take it to school.’ But now every time I look at this still today I like to think of that moment and how much it brought us together, and all the time that we spent together that we wouldn’t have had the time before [COVID].”

Sanger: “The most stressful was when I just lost track of some kids, they just stopped showing up, they weren’t turning work in. I would send emails: ‘Hey what’s going on, I haven’t seen any work in a while,’ and then you just don’t get a response and you feel really helpless as a teacher. How do I reach out to this kid, how do I just have a conversation with this kid? I can’t just wander over and say ‘hey what’s going on’ and a lot of times when you eventually find out what’s going on with that kid, you’d realize there’s a lot of challenges that [are] happening there. You feel powerless as a teacher to help and that’s a pretty awful feeling…There’s a sense of powerlessness because you just don’t have the tools to do what you know you should be doing and then to see that impacting kids in a way you can’t really help.”

Dunna: “The day the vaccine actually made it to Minnesota, they sent the first shipment to the VA hospital, which is significant for me, or to my life, because my dad works at the VA hospital and they gave the doctors their vaccines. And so I always think about ‘How cool was that? He was one of the first people in Minnesota to get the vaccine.’”

Gosh: “I’ve never been happier [than when the vaccine became available]. I actually remember that I was FaceTiming my friends and some of us were crying on the phone. We were like, ‘There is going to be a way out of this.’ Because obviously as nurses, we studied the science and we believe in the science and our foundation is based off of the science. And so it was never a question of whether public health nurses would trust vaccines. It was like, ‘When can we get these and when can we get them for our staff?’ So to me, that was a huge pivot in the pandemic and I think that was the first time where I was like, ‘I see light. I see light at the end of the tunnel.’”

Kieffer: “Teachers were one of the first groups of people to be able to get a vaccination. So once the health care professionals and the elderly have been taken care of in like January, February, it started opening up to the staff. It was a lottery. And it felt intense…I can remember sitting here and I got the email that I could go in and make an appointment and I got super excited… It was at the convention center. I stood in line amongst thousands and thousands of people. It was bizarre. And then when I got the vaccine, I broke down and started crying. I was like, I didn’t even know that I was carrying all this around inside of me. But it was such a sense of relief. I remember driving home and I called my husband bawling and I don’t even know why I was crying. I was just so relieved.” 

Garcia: “At first, to be honest, I didn’t really want to do the vaccine because I felt like I didn’t really need to do it because I could go out without it. I don’t know if it was the same here but in France, at some point—they said that the vaccine wasn’t compulsory. But if you weren’t vaccinated, you couldn’t go to the cinema, restaurants and basically all social activities. So the government was saying that we weren’t forced to be vaccinated, but if you wanted to basically live a regular life, you had to be vaccinated. And in addition to that, I had to be vaccinated to come here. So I got my main vaccine, but I did it during the summer just before I came here.”

Sanger: “We were really excited to get this shot because we’d been coming in every day with no real protection other than our mask and distance from this virus so to have that was just such a huge relief.”

Gosh: “I remember exactly what I was wearing [to my vaccination appointment]. I remember I set my alarm two hours early that morning [because] I didn’t want to sleep through my appointment. I remember taking pictures after and honestly celebrating like I just turned 21— not drinking, but it was like I just turned 16. Like it was such a milestone for me that it is a day I will never forget.”