18 | AUGUST 20 • 2020 

O

n the first day of his freshman 
year, my third and youngest 
child Toby confidently strode 
into the front entrance of the gleaming 
new Bloomfield Hills High School with 
a cup of Starbucks in his hand. He’
d 
bought it for a girl. On it 
was inscribed the words: I 
like you a Latte. Will you go to 
HoCo with me? 
His intended 
homecoming date had a 
scheduling conflict that 
night. But that morning of 
September 2017 was the 
auspicious beginning of a 
sometimes rocky, sometimes scary, but 
what we now look back on as a relatively 
normal high school career. 
For him, and every student out there, 
all normalcy came to a screeching halt 
on March 12, with the onset of the 
COVID-19 pandemic. Not even the 
horror of school shootings in recent years 
could have prepared any of us for such 
a complete and total disruption in our 
children’
s academic careers. 
In the normal life of a high school 
junior, by spring Toby and his peers 
would have taken one round of college 
entrance exams and visited some college 
campuses. But now they must get a feel 
for what life will be like as a collegiate 
through a website or a brochure. The 
College Board in the spring canceled 
entrance exams twice. By mid-summer, 
new test dates were announced. He 
scrambled to get a local test date but 
got shut out. So, bright and early a few 
Saturdays from now, we’
ll be driving 
to Toledo so he can take the SAT in an 
unknown school. In a classroom with an 
unknown number of students, with desks 
dubiously spaced. Who knows what the 
ventilation system will be like? 
That’
s unless, of course, the exam 
gets canceled. Again. Even if these 
tests do go on, it is unclear how much 
college admissions will be taking them 
into account as they also pivot in the 
pandemic age. 

Since March, we had all hoped 
against hope for normalcy to return 
in September. But neither parents, nor 
educators, nor school administrators call 
the shots. 
The pandemic does. 
On Aug. 6, the Bloomfield Hills 
Schools Board of Education, after a Zoom 
meeting that lasted seven hours, voted to 
forgo all in-person instruction for K-12 
students, at least for the first few months 
of the 2020-2021 school year. 
Just as it was in the spring, learning 
in isolation online will be tortuous for 
my very extroverted and theatrical son. 
Lifesaving, yes. Sanity-saving for all 
involved? Not so much. 
Toby suffers from anxiety and 
depression. His mental illness has taken 
us down a continuing road of therapists 
and meds and coping and not coping with 
an academic system often structured, not 
on what a child knows, but on when and 
if they hand in assignments. School can 
be a roller coaster ride even when a global 
pandemic is not threatening to sabotage 
your senior year. 
Toby misses participating in lively 
classroom dialogue at school with his 
peers. At least at school, when things go 
bad and the stress is high, you have your 
friends around you to commiserate at the 
lunch table.

Learning online again, Toby anticipates 
a struggle to stay on task. The silver lining 
is that his classes on the performing and 
media arts will be made available. To ease 
the isolation, he plans to find trusted 
study buddies to work with either in 
person or over FaceTime. 
More than classes, it is your community 
of peers that makes high school some of 
the best years of your life. This summer, 
Toby and other BHHS students continued 
to be involved with their high school 
by forming a Student Equity Council. 
Inspired by the Black Lives Matter 
movement and this summer’
s civil rights 
protests, they are actively petitioning 
school administrators to create a more 
inclusive and equitable social studies 
curriculum to fight racism through 
education. 
Whatever happens this school year, 
Toby knows he is blessed and privileged. 
Our family is healthy and relatively 
untouched by the economic woes of 
COVID. 
Plus, we have a pandemic puppy to give 
us love and lots of hairballs. 
So, whatever this new year brings, we 
are strapped in and ready. It’
s going to be 
a bumpy ride to graduation. 

This is the first in a series of diaries from Stacy 

Gittleman.

Stacy 
Gittleman 
Contributing 
Writer

STACY GITTLEMAN

(Not)
Back-to-School Diary

Jews in the D

back to school

