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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.”