High school taught Markelle Scott perseverance. He faced the stress of the pandemic and virtual classes, endured losing football seasons, worked through track practices where he had to wear a mask and suffered grief.

Those experiences, though, forced him to push through obstacles and inspired him to study biomedical science.

Scott was this year’s valedictorian at Huffman High School in Birmingham. He is part of a graduating class who were freshmen when the pandemic hit in 2020.

“I believe God will never bring a situation upon a generation he didn’t equip for it,” Scott said in his valedictorian speech this month.

“Through COVID and the loss of family members and teachers, we fought hard and still came out on top because we were equipped to weather the storm and be great in life. Now our lost loved ones can look down upon us and be proud of this great accomplishment of graduating high school in the midst of stress.”

Alabama has had one of the highest graduation rates in the country for the last few years. But in 2022, high school graduation rates dropped below 90% for the first time since 2017 to 88.2%. Data shows that more than 3,000 students who were part of the 2022 graduating class left high school without a diploma.

Alabama’s 2023 graduation rate is not available yet, but nationwide, states are reporting jumps in their dropout rates due to the pandemic. A 2022 survey by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that nearly 40% of high school students reported stress, anxiety and depression due to pandemic-related disruptions in schooling and their social lives. In 2021, the surgeon general warned of a ‘youth mental health crisis’ partly due to the stressors of COVID.

Birmingham City Schools managed to keep its graduation rates steady during the pandemic, and even saw an increase from an 80% graduation rate in 2018 to 82.8% in 2022.

Superintendent Mark Sullivan said the district focused on providing supports to get their students through to graduation, including sending home computers and iPads, setting up vaccination clinics in high schools, and offering summer and intersession remediation and free after school programs to address learning loss.

“Graduation rates have stayed relatively consistent through the pandemic because we really put a lot of support in place for our high school students…really trying to stay connected with those students because they’re a little bit more independent,” Sullivan said.

Read more: These Alabama high school graduates said goodbye to each other, and their school.

The pandemic highlighted a divide in the student population, he said, making him more aware of who had access to things like internet and food at home. Schools worked to provide curbside meals and mental health supports.

“I think that we’ve learned a lot of lessons tied to the pandemic. We can’t take things for granted. We have to always be nimble, and we have to be responsive to our students and our community,” Sullivan said. “Many people would not have thought that one of the major issues during the pandemic while students were out of school was meal service.”

The district lost eight employees and one student to COVID. In response, it partnered with organizations like Alabama Regional Medical Services to set up mental health clinics on campuses and place a counselor in every school.

The district now has a social emotional learning department, a Multidisciplinary Assessment Team (MAT) that evaluates students with mental health needs and trains staff to identify behavioral red flags.

The hardest part of the pandemic for Scott was virtual learning, which began for him on the heels of his freshman year spring break and continued throughout his sophomore year.

He didn’t like waking up every morning knowing he’d be on a computer all day with only a short break for lunch. There were too many technical difficulties, making it harder to learn, he said.

He still got to socialize with friends during football practice in his sophomore year, but it wasn’t the high school social life he imagined. Most of the time he communicated with friends in private Zoom chats.

To keep from getting too stressed about the pandemic, Scott prayed often. He also said his teachers helped out a lot, and were more understanding if students struggled to keep up.

“I think everybody was just trying to lend a hand because it was a time where everybody was confused. They don’t know what’s going on so everybody’s helping everybody,” Scott said. “Like even in class, we helped each other and if somebody’s confused, we’d help them with the answers or show them how to do it.”

Scott relied on Birmingham Promise, an organization that provides scholarships and internships to Birmingham City Schools students, as well as coaches to help them succeed in college. The organization set Markelle up with an internship at an oncology lab at UAB and gave him mentors to help prepare for college.

Jasmine Conner, lead student success coach at Birmingham Promise, saw a lot of anxiety and depression in the students she worked with during the pandemic. The organization began paying for counseling sessions for the ones who needed it – a service they continue to provide.

“The pandemic took a big toll on our students,” said Conner. “One of the bigger points of getting our students through the pandemic was taking a holistic approach and not necessarily just focusing on their academics, but making sure that we made sure that their mental health was okay as well.”

Birmingham City Schools has adopted a similar approach as educators look to a new normal after COVID.

Sullivan said that while the district will look at reading and math scores of their elementary school students to gauge learning loss, educators also will closely monitor data on attendance and how many referrals are coming into their counselors.

“We know that if you are hungry at home, it affects your learning at school. If you’re depressed, you have anxiety, that affects how well you learn in school… we just really have to be focused on the whole child and understand that one thing affects another thing that may affect another thing,” Sullivan said.

“We have to really be intentional about how we identify the needs of children and then providing them with the support just in time, so that those students can then be successful.”

Scott will continue to receive mentorship from Birmingham Promise when he enters Auburn University in the fall to study biomedical science. He believes that more than anything, the adversity of the pandemic has prepared him to be successful as a Tiger, and hopefully one day, as an oncologist.

“The future condition of this world will be a direct product of all of the stress and obstacles we conquered during a pivotal time in our world’s history,” he said to his classmates during his graduation speech.

“I honestly can’t wait to see what our strong, intelligent, and resilient graduating class will become 10, even 20 years from now. We are destined for greatness.”