By Joey Kaipust

Last Thursday, school ended. You might not have noticed. Usually, the last day of school is a very special day. Everybody is infectiously happy. People are making plans for summer with their friends. Teachers kick back and usually have a small, low stress activity planned for their class. And if anything, the last day of school is like one great, relieved sigh. However, this year, the last day of school was more like a long, drawn-out silence.

Sure, school might have technically ended, but with none of the definativity of a traditional last day. For many students it doesn’t even really feel over.

 “It felt like school didn’t end, we just stopped going to classes,” sophomore Laddie Wilkin said. This is a sentiment echoed by a lot of other students. Put simply, there was just something missing from the end of the 2019-2020 school year.

The typical happiness of the last day of school has always come from a sense of “we did it”. Everybody is together in having made it through another school year. This was conspicuously missing this year. Instead, students sat alone and maybe finished up a few assignments that they missed. The community feel was gone, and this was what really caused it to lack finality.

In all reality, the last day of school wasn’t even the last day of school. Because of the limitation posed by remote learning, many teachers are still accepting missing work, and as a result there are students still working to get assignments turned in. Here I am, writing this article to raise my Advanced Journalism grade, several days after the technical end of the school year. For many students, school is still very much in session.

This creates a gray area of this week, where it has been summer break, but school still hangs in the minds of students for many reasons. AP exams are going on that they need to study for. There are missing assignments they are hustling to get turned in. It really makes this week feel like as much of a school week as the one before it. 

After the final grades are put in and AP exams conclude, maybe that much needed feeling of finality will be there. But until then, we are all left wondering, “Is it over?”.