Bridget Donovan has spent most of her senior year alone in her room, staring at a computer screen. Every school day for the past year, she logged into Zoom classes and struggled to pay attention. She missed her friends, her teachers, and the tech booth in the Framingham High School auditorium, where Bridget used to run the stage lights before the coronavirus pandemic upended her life.
“Since my school shut down last March, this year has been a crazy ride,” Bridget said in one of a series of video diaries sent to GBH News as part of our COVID and the Classroom series. “I feel like I haven’t been to school since, like, 300 years ago. I can’t even remember the last time I walked down the halls of Framingham High School.”
Finally, with roughly two months left in the school year, Bridget joined some 1350 other students — roughly half of the student body — in returning to school. The students alternate weeks in school, so the hallways weren't especially crowded. Still, after so much time home, being back in the building was an adjustment.
“I will say it was kinda really hard to focus,” Bridget said. “It was definitely a different atmosphere.”
Some things — the buses pulling into the front of the school, the consistent and shrill ringing of the bell — fell easily back into place like little tokens of normalcy. The differences from how school used to be, before everything changed last March, were more pronounced. Now, everyone wears masks, the school offers COVID-19 testing in the cafeteria, and Bridget’s psychology class was down to three people: Bridget, another student, and her teacher, Maria Sequenzia.
“How are you feeling about this test?” Sequenzia asked Bridget. “Be honest.”
“Not well,” Bridget responded. “Not well.”
“Let me pull up your grade,” Sequenzia offered.
“It’s baaaaad,” warned Bridget.
Bridget isn't the only student who has been struggling to keep her grades up during the pandemic. Jeff Convery, a vice principal at Framingham High, said almost every student at the school has struggled.
“The number of F's that we see are higher than we had seen prior to remote learning,” Convery said. “I think like anything, even if for no other reason, just this shift in trying to learn a new way of learning has been challenging for even the strongest students.”
After her classes are over, when most students have left the building, Bridget burst through the doors of what was once her second home: the high school auditorium. She set the lights to bathe the stage in purple light, and ran up to gaze out at the empty rows of seats.
“Here we go, my favorite part,” Bridget said, with glee in her voice. “Really it’s such a weird feeling to be back here, but it’s the best feeling, the best feeling ever.”
Bridget has lost a year of running lights for shows: no fall play, no winter musical. Now she finds herself missing even the most monotonous parts of the job.
“Just being back here and seeing it all ... it's just nostalgic,” she said. “Putting gels in and focusing them, I never used to really like them, because they were so tedious … but seeing how I left it a year ago, I used to hate it, but now I'd do anything to get it back.”
What might have been the greatest year of Bridget’s high school tech theater career was taken from her; but there's a new energy in just being here, in knowing that things are changing.
“Honestly, I think if I can get through this year, I can get through anything,” Bridget said. “If anything, I feel stronger. I got through the first year of COVID — I don’t want to go through more, but I’m ready if it happens.”
Audio and writing by Tori Bedford, video by Emily Judem
