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Reina Espino Torres, a student at Curie Metropolitan High School, is mentally and emotionally drained.
She sits in front of a computer up to eight hours each weekday for virtual classes and has homework she sometimes doesn’t understand, with little access to teachers. She also recently suffered personal loss — her uncle who raised her passed away of COVID-19.
“I was on the verge of giving up on school,” Reina said in a virtual student discussion this week about Chicago Public Schools’ reopening plans. “I was so gone to a depressed episode. And my teachers, they didn’t really know how to handle that. Even when I didn’t go to school for like two weeks, when I came back to school I had a load of homework, they didn’t know how to assist me, they didn’t know how to help me. They didn’t have any mental resources for me.”