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Meet Annie Badger, Northern student body president
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NHS president wishes for ‘normal, mask-less’ school year
After remote learning this past year, Annie Badger said she and her Northern Guilford High School classmates look forward to return of traditional activities
by CHRIS BURRITT
NORTHERN GUILFORD – Annie Badger is hoping for “a normal, maskless senior year” starting in August for herself and her classmates at Northern Guilford High School.
“There isn’t a reason for us not to be in person, especially since we were in person for the final weeks of the school year,” Badger said. “That’s a really good sign for the fall.”
The 17-year-old from Summerfield served as Northern’s student body president as a junior. She’s serving in the same position as a senior, giving her back-to-back experience spanning the COVID-19 pandemic.
This past year, traditional activities such as Homecoming Week in the fall and prom in the spring gave way to activities such as a virtual Spirit Week. A canned food drive replaced the Powder Puff football game between juniors and seniors.
In the coming school year, Badger hopes to make up for some of the past year’s losses. As an example, she’s proposing dress-up theme days each Friday during the football season, versus limiting the activity to Spirit Week.
She figures that just as students adapted to COVID-19’s restrictions, they can be equally creative now that the pandemic is fading.
The outbreak “showed our resilience,” Badger said in a recent interview. “We stayed together as Northern Guilford High School and showed that we can do things no matter the circumstances. We’ve all grown so much from it.”
Badger and her younger brother, Henry, studied remotely from home most of the school year. Their mother, Jenny, worked from home, straining the family’s internet connection until they installed a Wi-Fi booster.
The technical inconvenience was small compared to one of the unexpected benefits of cocooning at home, according to Badger.
“The biggest benefit for me was spending quality time with my family,” she said. “We usually don’t get to do that because our lives are so busy. We had family dinners and watched TV together. I really appreciated that about COVID.”
Even so, Badger said she welcomed the return to in-person classes late in the school year.
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Photo courtesy of Annie Badger (L-R) Annie Badger, her mother, Jenny, and her younger brother, Henry. Badger said spending more quality time with family was an unexpected benefi t of COVID.
Badger said in-person classroom instruction helped her focus in advance of exams. “Paying attention was 110 percent better in person,” she said.
“At home, it was so easy to go on your phone or watch the lawn mower guy mowing the yard,” she said. “You don’t have those little distractions at school.”
Remote learning forced students and their families to “learn a whole new sphere of things” about technology, Badger said. Jokingly, she worried that the new knowledge will come back to haunt students next year when snowy, icy weather would typically cancel classes.
“I’m afraid we’ll never have snow days again,” she said. “They’re going to say, ‘it’s a virtual learning day.’ There needs to be a rule where they give us the day off.”
