The high school seniors of 2020 find new ways to celebrate in the face of an uncertain future.

IT DIDN’T SINK IN RIGHT AWAY THAT ALL THE CHERISHED SENIOR-YEAR TRADITIONS STUDENTS WERE LOOKING FORWARD TO WERE ABOUT TO VANISH BEFORE THEIR EYES when Monterey County schools announced on March 13 they were closing due to the Covid-19 pandemic. At that point, they were closing through April 4. As two weeks turned into four weeks and then the rest of the year, suddenly class trips, picnics, prom, award ceremonies, signing yearbooks, plays, end-of-year concerts were – poof – gone.

“When I went to school that last Friday, I didn’t think it would be the end,” says Pacific Grove High School senior Oscar Scholin. He expected he and his friends would be joking about a brief closure over spring break before moving on with their final year of high school.

Even then, some thought somehow a traditional graduation ceremony – the milestone event marking not only educational achievement but a symbol of stepping out of childhood into adulthood – could still happen, possibly by delaying into the summer. Eventually, the virus nixed that idea as well.

Alternate graduation plans became the focus of school districts and PTAs across the country. Celebrities joined in the effort to take away the sting of missing out for the Class of 2020. Basketball legend LeBron James and his foundation pulled together a national event called Graduate Together: America Honors the High School Class of 2020, which was streamed live and aired on every major TV network on May 16. It featured graduating seniors, actors, musicians and the prized graduation speaker-get, former President Barack Obama.

At Carmel High School, Senior Class President Mia Kotelec says they bandied about ideas like a parade in downtown Carmel or through the campus of CSU Monterey Bay. Other high schools were considering some form of drive-through ceremonies. Then the ultimate drive-through was announced: the county’s high schools were invited to hold their ceremonies at WeatherTech Raceway Laguna Seca. Track Manager John Narigi says he contacted Monterey County Supervisor Mary Adams and had extensive discussions with Monterey County Superintendent Deneen Guss and Health Officer Edward Moreno to lay out the parameters for a safe event.

The Monterey County Office of Education sent out the invitation to all high schools in the county. Carmel, Pacific Grove and Monterey Peninsula Unified school districts, plus Learning for Life Charter School in Marina, all accepted the invitation. Each has a designated day between May 29-June 3, with each high school getting its own ceremony. One vehicle per household is allowed. Students will get to get out to walk a stage and pick up a diploma and there will be brief speeches over the loudspeaker. Ceremonies will be livestreamed for those who can’t come along. After the ceremony, families will drive the track at 15mph (led by pace cars), all the way to a checkered flag finish.

“How many can say they drove around a world class racetrack? Not many,” P.G. High School PTA President Dana Marshall says.

Other high schools in Monterey County are holding their own drive-through graduation ceremonies where each student will be able to pick up their diploma and get their photo taken – from six feet away – with their principal. Parent organizations have been finding other creative ways to make seniors feel special the last couple of weeks leading up to ceremonies, with yard signs, banners in downtown areas, gifts and other special public tributes.

The Class of 2020 is creating its own set of lifelong memories unique to them in the midst of a pandemic. There was disappointment at losing the traditional end-of-year events and pomp and circumstance, but it was tempered with a sense of guilt among her classmates that people were dying from the virus, says Kotelec.

She and other seniors the Weekly spoke to say they see something positive coming out of the situation that other classes may miss out on. Walls between cliques are coming down and new friendships are being formed.

“It’s definitely bringing a lot of people together right now,” Carmel High’s Kotelec says. She hopes her class will remain connected well into the future. “It’s been a crazy experience, and it will stick with us the rest of our lives.”

The Weekly joins in congratulating the Class of 2020, and in these pages features several standout students chosen randomly from suggestions made by administrators and community members. Collectively, they share a spirit of hopefulness for their futures, despite the pandemic.

Sierra Brinton | Carmel High School

It was the feeling of community at Carmel High School that helped Sierra Brinton develop her purpose. “I took away if you can join a community or group of people it will help you find your place,” she says. “It really shaped who I am.”

At school, Brinton especially enjoyed her time as an advanced sports medicine student with her mentor, CHS teacher Matt Borek, who founded the sports medicine program. She was also a member of the swim team. Outside of school, Brinton was a teen conservation leader at the Monterey Bay Aquarium, and she served on the social media team for the conservation program, and participated in the Aquarium’s Operation Student Ambassador program. She served as an intern for the U.S. Bureau of Land Management at the Fort Ord National Monument in the summer of 2019. It sparked an interest in conservation of public lands and taught her about working with supervisors and being spontaneous when plans were changed.

She will attend UC Davis in the fall, where she will study geology. The plan for now is to move into the dorms, pandemic aside, and she says she’s grateful the University of California system hasn’t rushed to virtual classes only in the fall. (The system announced campuses will make their decisions by mid-June.) In the meantime, Brinton is thinking about applying for a job with the U.S. Census to collect data.

Eduardo “Lalo” Hernandez-Marquez | North Monterey County High School

For Eduardo Hernandez-Marquez, known as Lalo to family and friends, a highlight of his senior year is one of those once-in-a-lifetime events others only dream of. It was the night of the NMCHS Homecoming game at Soquel High School. The Condors were the underdog playing the undefeated Knights. Hernandez-Marquez was the team’s kicker and to everyone’s elation, he made the winning three-point kick for a score of 17-14.

“I will never forget that moment. It felt like all of Castroville was there,” he says. Not only was he the hero of the game, he was voted a homecoming prince.

In addition to varsity football, Hernandez-Marquez played his main sport, varsity soccer, and served as captain of the team his junior and senior years. He was president of the Do Something Club, spreading cheer around campus. A guitar player for the last eight years, he and his brother formed a band called El Gran Baile. They volunteered to play traditional Mexican music at school dances.

He’s excited about attending San Diego State University in the fall to study kinesiology. The California State University system is going virtual for the fall, but Hernandez-Marquez hopes he can still move into a dorm room and enjoy sunny days in San Diego while starting his college career. Although he always dreamed of becoming a professional soccer player, he realized it was a longshot, so his goal is to work for a professional soccer team as an athletic trainer.

Oscar Scholin | Pacific Grove High School

If there was a category for “Renaissance Man” on the roster of senior awards, Oscar Scholin would easily win. (He was named “Salutatorian,” which means he will give a graduation speech at Laguna Seca on May 29; see story, p. 16.)

Scholin is already a poet, musician, mathematician and journalist. He has a website, oscarshoelinpoet.com, where he posts poems, essays and other musings. He also has a YouTube channel under his name where he works out mathematical equations and reads some of his poetry.

“To me math and poetry really are one and the same. I see math as the language of the universe and equations are expressions of poetry that gets to the meanings and workings of the universe,” Scholin says. He marvels at how out of nothing, markings on a piece of paper can be arranged “in ways that can be so profound and have an impact on people and the world and you can almost create these symphonies out of scratches on paper.”

He served as co-editor of NewsBreaker, the P.G. High School newspaper, played French horn in the music program, and was in the robotics and science clubs. Outside of school he played in the Pacific Grove POPS orchestra and the Monterey French Horn Ensemble.

Scholin is attending Cornell University in Ithaca, New York in the fall. He plans to double-major in math and history.

As someone who always needs to be doing something, Scholin, says, shelter-in-place was hard at first, but he turned to his love of writing and spent time working out the answer to an equation as old as humankind itself: What is the meaning of life?

“What I realized is that life is not a journey from point A to point B. Life only appears to be a journey when we see from behind,” he begins in a well-thought out and eloquent explanation. Basically, “we don’t walk backward we walk forward,” and from the Big Bang to coronavirus, life is in a state of flux. We will remain hopeless, he says, if we see life as a series of obstacles instead of opportunities.

Kelly Harvell | Monterey High School

Kelly Harvell doesn’t regret the things she didn’t get to do as a senior in the graduating class at Monterey High School. She’s not bitter about the science fair or prom being canceled, not even about not being able to have a traditional graduation.

For the student-scientist and athlete, this past year of school had been a balancing act. Like any other senior, she was concerned about all the lasts she would be experiencing with her classmates and friends before they finished school and parted ways for college in the fall. But when Covid-19 took many of those “lasts” away, she moved through the stages of grief quickly, and began appreciating what the pandemic had given her – time with her dad and younger sister.

Less than two years ago, Harvell lost her mother to cancer. “It’s been an incredible experience being able to be with my family every day,” she says.

Because of the pandemic, Harvell had to cancel planned college visits to the East Coast where she was accepted to both Yale and Harvard. She decided to stay closer to home and will be starting at Stanford in the fall with a plan to study bioengineering with a specification in biomedical engineering. It’s a decision she says her dad, who never went to college, wanted to be totally hers. “When I told him I had chosen Stanford, he admitted that he’d been scared for me to go far away,” she adds. “What if because of the pandemic I couldn’t get on an airplane if I needed to?”

The pandemic has also helped ease her fear that she and her friends would lose touch when they disperse for college. Friendship doesn’t always have to be in a physical space as they use FaceTime and social media to keep in touch.

“Cherish anything that comes with senior year,” she says. “It’s something you can’t replicate.”

Emily Ramirez | North Salinas High School

Emily Ramirez was sitting at her kitchen table when she heard the announcement by California Gov. Gavin Newsom on April 1 that schools would be closed for the remainder of the academic year.

She had the inkling in the back of her mind that this was a possibility. Her friends even joked in a group chat at the start of their spring break that if school was canceled they wouldn’t get a traditional graduation. But it didn’t cushion the blow.

That last day before spring break began was the last day her whole graduating class would be together again, and none of them knew it at the time. “My mom looked at me and said, ‘You’re really upset for somebody that was a truant,’” she says, half-joking.

Her reason for skipping class in recent weeks: A classic case of senioritis. Now she’s experiencing a new type of senioritis in tandem with Covid-19: the disappointment of feeling robbed of final high school moments.

For Ramirez, graduation wasn’t just the celebration of finishing high school. It was a milestone marking what comes next – for her, attending college at Sacramento State. (All CSUs are planning to do the fall 2020 semester virtually.)

Ramirez’s mom is a first-generation college graduate who always wanted her kids to achieve more than she did. Walking across the stage and celebrating with family and friends isn’t about everything Ramirez had achieved up to that point, but everything she is on her way to achieving.

On May 21, as she talks about what comes next, she prepares to sign her letter of intent at the same table she found out about everything that was being taken away from her senior year.

Isaiah Corpus | Palma High School

For student athletes, the pandemic means not just no more school, but no more sports. For Isaiah Corpus, there was no real goodbye to the baseball teammates he’s played with since he was 10 years old.

Losing the rest of his final season was doubly hard because Corpus already sat out most of the last year due to an injury.

The frustration is likely to follow him to Boise State University next year. Because college students in their final year of eligibility didn’t get to play a full season due to Covid-19, many schools across the nation are giving them another year to play spring sports. That means students like Corpus, who wanted to start a sport their freshman year of college, have a smaller chance of becoming a collegiate athlete right away. “A lot of seniors who are spring athletes may have been on scholarship or looked at, but you can only have a certain amount of people on a team,” he says.

His plan to attend Boise State is on hold. Now his plan is to spend the summer in Idaho, where he is currently living with his grandparents and working for a landscaping company, then come back home to Salinas to take classes – and hopefully play baseball – at Monterey Peninsula College. “We are going to get started on our majors and hopefully within a year we can transfer out,” he says.