School isn’t going how people were expecting. Since being sent back to school in person students are making sure to social distance, always having a mask on and following many precautions to  prevent this pandemic from spreading like a wildfire. But being in school may not be the safest way to proceed given the circumstances. Even with social distancing and wearing masks, being in school requires being around many groups of people who could be sick and not even know.

Trystan Wahl, a senior at Papillion- La Vista High School, feels like school should go remote during the COVID-19 pandemic to assure safety for all students and staff.

“Starting school back up during a whole pandemic I think is honestly kind of crazy,” Wahl said.  “The fact we got sent home last year only from a few hundred reports of COVID but now there are over thousands and even millions of cases and now we get sent back is weird to me.”

Rules have been set around the whole school to provide every class with supplies to clean used materials ensuring the incoming class a sanitized area to work.

“I feel like the school could do a better job of actually making sure and remembering to continuously clean and sanitize,” Wahl said. “There’s some classes I’ll go to and it won’t be clean, so I think being at school is just so much more responsibility then staff and students need, remote would be simpler and also way safer.”

Nicole O’Brien, a junior at PLHS is wary about being in school during the pandemic.

“I feel unsafe and wherever I go I feel like I could just catch it and not know,” O’Brien said. “I feel like I’m one of the high risk kids and I fear I’ll bring it home.”

O’Brien also believes sanitization is something that needs to be improved within the school.

“I know most of the time where I go is probably not sanitized, even though the expectations are to make sure every space is cleaned. Sometimes people forget and it’s not something that should be forgotten during a seriously dangerous pandemic,” O’Brien said. “And even with the masks, I feel fear when walking through halls because a lot of the students don’t wear their mask or don’t cover where they’re supposed to cover and that’s a main safety precaution that should be taken seriously.”

PLHS is all around a safe school with great faculty, but public school alongside a pandemic may not be the best idea when there can be deadly consequences. Regardless if we go fully remote or not, students and staff will do their best to prevent the spread of the virus.