As a result of the pandemic, people had to cancel, postpone, or make the decision to still go on their summer vacations, as well as altering their summer plans in general.
Senior Zenb Ali said she was disappointed that her plans to take a trip to Turkey for a month were canceled.
“It had me down for a few days because it was going to be my first time going there and it was a place I have wanted to visit for a really long time. When I got told that it got canceled, it made me quite devastated,” Ali said.
Ali said she used this unexpected free time to learn new skills over the summer instead.
“Seeing as we were all quarantining, I ended up going into video editing and taking online classes for it,” Ali said.
Senior Benza Barafundi said she expected to take a trip to Dallas, Texas for a week but had to stay longer for a required quarantine by the state.
“I wasn’t surprised when my family and I had to be there for an extended period of time because we visited a lot of tourist attractions,” Barafundi said.
Barafundi said that as a result, the cost of the trip was higher.
“When we had to delay our departure, money became an issue because we planned our trip accordingly,” Barafundi said.
French teacher Kacey Schlotz said she stuck to her plans and traveled to Colorado for a vacation with her family for a week because she deemed it to be a low risk for virus transmission; each day was spent outdoors and away from others.
“It was an all outdoor activity vacation. We stayed at Rocky Mountain National Park in a cabin, so we were off on our own for most of the time,” Schlotz said.
Although her vacation was able to go on as planned, Schlotz said she had to prepare for the school year differently this summer than she normally would due to the circumstances surrounding COVID-19. Schlotz was a part of the committee that wrote the French curriculum that Rockwood students are currently using on Canvas.
“Me and almost all of the French teachers in the district worked together through Zoom and created the entire first quarter unit one and two Canvas online curriculum,” Schlotz said. “We created it, we put it in templates and I was also a teacher leader so after all of the other units were finished I went through every unit from level one through level five in Canvas making sure that all of the links worked, making sure that all of the guidelines were met, and all the units met the standards that were needed before it went live,” Schlotz said.
