1st Place, Informative Feature
2021-22, Division 3, News Writing
By Willa Cornillie
Portrait
East Lansing HS
When Brielle Williams (11) first got sick in early September, she already felt like the few days of school that she had missed set her back. But even though bouts of sickness continued throughout September and early October, she felt obligated to come to school so she wouldn’t get even further behind.
It was hard for her to feel like she could ever catch up on her school-work. She felt as though she had to teach herself full units worth of work and didn’t even consider the work to be “worth it.”
“I’ve come to school every time be-cause I can’t miss any more. It affects my grades,” Williams said. “But it’s something I can’t control, and I stay home all day when I’m sick, feeling guilty and feeling stressed about what I’m missing in school.”
And Williams isn’t alone in coming to school when sick. In a poll on the Portrait Instagram, 75 percent of the 52 students who participated felt pressured to return to school before they recovered.
Assistant Principal Ashley Schwarz-bek agrees that students often feel pressured to return to school after being out sick, before they are fully recovered. She suggests the issue may stem from the American standard in the adult workplace of constant perfection with few breaks.
She thinks that this standard makes it so students don’t take enough breaks, or enough sick days to make sure they’re fully ready to return, both mentally and physically.
“I think that there’s a whole societal expectation around that, and you see it in adults working too,” Schwarzbek said. “And I think that just gets trans-ferred on to teenagers as well. I think that’s probably just a super common piece of American culture.”
But students who are struggling when they return to school aren’t always coming to their counselors, which makes it difficult for the counselors and social worker Jessica Poke to support them.
“As the Student Services Department, since we’re not in the classroom as teachers, and you know, knowing when kids are out and when they’re coming back, and if their demeanor is different than when they left, it’s hard for us to know if they’re feeling overwhelmed in the classroom,” Poke said.
Both Poke and counselor Jennifer Jockheck stress the importance of students reaching out if they feel overwhelmed or if they’re struggling. A survey was also sent out in Excel in late October asking students to evaluate themselves through more specific questions than the mental health questions from last year, with the hopes that they will be able to help students who fear reaching out themselves.
“Reaching out is so important,” Jockheck said. “And I do think that maybe sometimes students just don’t want to or they feel embarrassed, or you know, whatever that may be, but you know, we’re gonna work with you to help. But I think that it’s almost an American culture thing, you know. Everything has to be perfect. We have to do it all and, you know, ‘sacrifice myself so that I can achieve this.’”
Students like Hadley Doll (11), who has also been out sick, hope that the district might include more hybrid options. It took Doll nearly a week to catch up on the work she missed while sick, but she feels as though there are more effective ways to keep students caught up.
“The absences made me nervous,” Doll said. “I felt like I needed to be back in school, and I was missing a lot. I was really behind when I came back to school I feel like putting things on Google Classroom, like homework, would help a lot.”
Schwarzbek wants to accommodate student’s needs, but she is also concerned about placing too much pressure on teachers. Hybrid learning in the 2020-2021 school year proved to be a major strain on many staff members.
‘We didn’t want our staff to have to try to teach synchronously this year where they were both trying to teach like an online version and a face to face version like we did at the end of last year,” Schwarzbek said. “We couldn’t go fully in that direction, but we understood that assignments were still really going to need to be accessible for students.”
Students like Williams and Doll are still left feeling overwhelmed and stressed. There is no simple solution to an issue that is rooted in a much deeper issue of cultural pressure.
“I can’t afford for my grades to go down, because at the end of the day, all I have right now is my grades for my future,” Williams said. “So it’s just like it’s a big hole, and I fall down it every time I get sick, and I think that also contributes to better my depression.”
NW-12. Informative Feature
Facts are obtained from research, interviews and observations.
Judging Criteria
- Leads capture attention, arouses curiosity
- Topic relevant to interests and/or welfare of school or students
- Thorough investigation through research and interviews
- Combines basics of good news and feature writing
- Organized with smooth transitions
- Sentences, paragraphs of varied length; written clearly, concisely and vividly
- Uses proper diction and grammar
- Balanced and fair presentation
- Story relies on information from primary sources gathered/interviewed directly by the journalist(s); general Internet sources and secondary media reports are used sparingly