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Photography by Ann White
Ocean Okohson-Reb’s parents chose his name carefully, In their Nigerian tradition, because of its meaning: “large, unquenchable, really powerful.” He intends to draw on that power, studying political science and law—in a quest for social justice—after he graduates from St. Louis University High School.
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Photography by Ann White
Stephanie Njeri spent eighth grade in Kenya, her parents’ homeland, “and finally got to hear my last name pronounced right!” Her dream is to study international relations at Georgetown University and work in the foreign service: “I want to be part of peace talks and calming down situations.” Once eager to “blend in and not be too much,” she’s gotten involved at Lutheran North High School and overcome her shyness: “It’s not like I’m screaming from the rooftops, but I’ve learned how to express myself.”
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Photography by Ann White
Sarah Brinkmann loves statistics, science, and nature, so when she graduates from Nerinx Hall, she will either prepare for pharmacy school or do environmental studies. “I’ve loved chemistry ever since I took it, and I would love to be in the lab, doing research, and helping people in the process,” she says. “I’ve also become passionate about the environment—one of the core beliefs of the order that founded Nerinx is to protect our planet.”
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Photography by Ann White
Isa Rosario-Blake is fascinated by policy and international relations. Lately, though, she’s been focusing on domestic policy; she did an assignment at John Burroughs School based on the New York Times’ 1619 project, and she invited a scholar to school to talk about the intersections between immigration and the criminal justice system.
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Photography by Ann White
Zoë Goffe traveled to China in her junior year at Whitfield School, and she has volunteered here in public health education. This January, when COVID-19 was starting to spread in china, she warned her friends, “The flu argument is misleading—this is so infectious. Don’t underestimate it!” Before law school, she hopes to study political science or statistics, preparation for public policy or legal advocacy work.
Editor's note: This story first appeared in our 2020 Private School Handbook.
Schooled by a Pandemic
“At first, I thought it was a complete overreaction,” Isa Rosario-Blake says of COVID-19, “and then, about a week later, everything shut down all at once.” She was jolted into fear—not for herself but instead for her family. “And I was a little worried for my elderly teachers, that they might not be able to come back.
“The uncertainty was a lot of the worry, and it still is,” she says. “You have to take things day by day.” It was a sudden but inevitable lesson: “As you get older, you realize, not everything is going to pan out the way you want it to.”
What scares Stephanie Njeri is not the virus but “how people are responding to it. If they don’t listen to scientists and the government, who is going to make them say, ‘OK, maybe I should wear a mask’?”
Zoë Goffe thinks politicians who refuse to wear a mask “just want to downplay the severity of the situation.” For others, “a lot of it may go back to xenophobia. In a lot of Asian countries, people had been wearing masks, whether for air pollution or to avoid germs, and people don’t want to feel like we have to do that here in America. We are safe; we don’t need any other protection; we are fine.”
This is the COVID-19 generation, shaped—who knows how yet?—by a pandemic. “I feel like our generation will pay more attention to global health,” says Sarah Brinkmann. “We might even see a change in majors, more people wanting to learn about epidemiology or study viruses and find cures.”
Because she loves science, the shift to online education was frustrating: “You lose the ability to do a lab and see things up close or to meet with a teacher one on one.” Everybody “always looks a little sad in the box on the screen,” says Rosario-Blake. “Online classes have been so weird. I’m not a fan.”
These students have missed other experiences, too: dances, ceremonies, college visits. Brinkmann missed a trip to Costa Rica to study leatherback sea turtles, and she couldn’t go back to her beloved summer job on a snow cone truck. Goffe had just gotten a car and was having so much fun with her friends “and all of a sudden there’s, like, nothing.”
But the upside was more free time, and it opened up all sorts of possibilities. Njeri started baking chapati with her 5-year-old brother. Brinkmann got outside more. “It’s good for your soul,” she says. And Goffe ordered herself a skateboard. “I’ve always wanted to do that, but I thought I was too old,” she says. “We are told you need to be doing this and this and getting ahead. But just spending more time with my parents has been really nice. Getting to know them better, in a way that’s not forced.
“Being able to slow down has made me OK with a lot of things,” she adds. “Anything could happen—and that complete, utter loss of control has put a lot of things into perspective. It’s OK if things don’t always work out.”
Life in a pandemic is “really…restricting,” says Ocean Okohson-Reb, “but we are living in a historic time.” When he and his friends started checking in with each other on a regular video chat, it turned into a plan to advocate for equality of policing and financing across St. Louis. He also has quiet moments, caught by the realization that anyone he knows could become ill, even die. “Our time on Earth can be really short,” he says. “It’s kind of driving me to do something meaningful, make indelible change.”
Can’t Let the Momentum Slow
The main thing about the recent protests, says Brinkmann, is that “we need to keep one foot on the gas; we need to keep pushing.” Growing up white, she never thought much about race at all. “When the Ferguson protests were happening, I didn’t really understand. That was white privilege. I never had to understand it.” Now, she notices how many makeup shades and even bandages are aimed at light skin, how “nude” is defined as white, how many people have to fear being pulled over or having an interaction with a stranger.
“A great place to start would be the educational system,” suggests Okohson-Reb. He has looked for some logical reason that public school funding has to be based on that area’s tax revenue, “and couldn’t find anything to defend it. Honestly, I believe it’s just a remnant of times past—and it’s something we need to change now.”
“The wealth gap isn’t changing,” notes Rosario-Blake, and “there are so many ways Blacks and indigenous people are highly policed. We need to invest more in education.”
Her friends in Europe are far more impassioned about climate change than these social issues, but she’s beginning to see overlaps: “Asthma in inner cities—it’s all connected. Homes on the west side of a city are always more expensive because of the way the air flows. The fact that we know that—if it’s so obvious, isn’t there a solution?”
Njeri sighs: “It’s tempting to think we should just start over with a whole new world. But there are good things we don’t realize—like the stimulus checks. In Kenya, it was much harder to institute a lockdown because people needed to work, and money that was supposed to get to them didn’t. We were able to deploy all these different things at once. It seemed slow, but that’s only because Americans like things fast and a week is too long!”
If Handed a Magic Wand…
“I would tackle the lack of empathy,” says Njeri. “I think that’s the root of all the political problems. People think that caring is not a valid way of reasoning.”
“Ignorance,” declares Okohson-Reb. “That’s the stem of everything. The people who are working under you or making your clothes in another country at less than a living wage—if you were able to see them as people and know that they have families and they don’t have enough to eat—you would be able to find it in your heart to treat them right and maybe have a little less money yourself.”
“I guess if I’m holding true to my environmental beliefs, I would change all fossil fuels to clean fuel,” says Brinkmann. “With COVID-19, air quality in China has improved so much, they’re expecting to see half as many deaths as a result of air pollution as they had in previous years. The U.S. had made great strides, and now we’re pulling back on them.”
“I don’t think there can be just one thing,” says Rosario-Blake, “because everything intersects. But I guess I’d get rid of COVID-19. It’s making a lot of problems worse.” She’s not talking about missing prom; she’s talking about crowded deportation facilities and mass incarceration and delayed court cases. Her strongest hope is that the pandemic “catalyzes a more collectivist perspective. Individualism is important, but we also need a measure of civil society, of trust in each other.”
Goffe sees intersections, too—unregulated capitalism and the income inequality that results; ecojustice issues, with minority communities built around old nuclear waste sites or with air thick with toxins that worsen asthma… “It can be overwhelming. A lot of kids my age, we think we have to fix it all right now. But I think that energy and enthusiasm are going to carry us further than people think.”
