What to expect when the Class of 2030 enters high school this fall: a teacher’s perspective
Last Tuesday, I stood by my 10th grade English classroom door during freshman orientation, sweat beading at the back of my neck from the hallway AC that’s still broken after summer maintenance, passing out printed syllabi to a stream of kids with crisp new lanyards that haven’t been broken in yet. The first kid who stopped to ask me a question was Milo, 14, faded Minecraft hoodie slung over his backpack strap, socks pulled up to his calves to cover a new skateboard scrape. “Do you have a touchless water fountain near here?” he asked. “I don’t really use the ones you have to push with your hands.” Five more kids asked the exact same question before the first bell for the orientation session rang.
After the session ended, Milo’s mom hung back by the door, twisting her car key fob around her finger while the last of the families filed out. She introduced herself, then asked if she could ask me something off the record. “He was in second grade when everything shut down,” she said. “Spent all of third and half of fourth grade learning at our dining room table. He’s been in person for middle school for three years, but he still takes the back hallway to avoid the crowd between classes, still orders his burger through the app instead of talking to the cashier at the counter. I don’t know if he’s ready for all this—six classes a day, 500 kids in the cafeteria, all the unwritten rules no one ever tells you about high school.”
This is what no one talks about when they talk about the Class of 2030 entering high school this fall. They’re not just a catchy name for a graduation banner hanging in the gym. Every major milestone of their early childhood happened in the middle of a global pandemic. They learned to share toys and raise their hands in Zoom rooms, not playgrounds. They got used to quiet days at home, digital assignments, and avoiding crowds for so long that those habits don’t just disappear when you hand them a high school ID.
Headlines love to call them the “lost cohort” or say they’re years behind academically and socially. But after 12 years of teaching high school, that’s not what I see walking around orientation. I see a group of kids with different needs than the classes that came before them, not worse needs.
I’ve made a handful of small changes to my classroom this year that I never would have thought of five years ago, all for this cohort. I dumped the whole-class “introduce yourself to 30 strangers” icebreaker that makes every kid want to disappear into the floor. Instead, I pair kids up and give them 10 minutes to talk about their favorite current show or game. If either kid doesn’t want to talk out loud, they can type back and forth on a shared Google Doc pulled up on the classroom Chromebooks. I keep a labeled “extra copies” folder by my door for every worksheet, and post every single assignment—even in-class work—to Google Classroom, so kids who lose papers or prefer reading off a screen can access it anytime. When we do whole-class discussions, I keep a shared comment box open on the screen so kids can type their thoughts instead of raising their hand, if that feels easier.
When parents ask me what they can do at home to help their incoming freshman adjust, I give them three small, concrete things to try, no big gestures needed. First, drive over to the school a week before classes start, park, and walk the hallways with your kid. Help them map their route from first period to lunch to their last class, and let them spin their locker combination a dozen times to practice. That 20-minute walk cuts down on 80% of the first-day panic I see every year. Second, let them take a photo of their schedule with their phone instead of forcing them to memorize it the first week. No teacher is going to side-eye a kid for pulling out their phone to check which room they need next. Third, ask them “what’s one small thing that felt hard today” instead of “how was your first day of high school.” Nine times out of ten, they’ll just mumble “fine” to the big question, but the small question gets them talking about the actual thing bugging them—their locker wouldn’t open, the lunch line was too long, their teacher talks too fast.
Last week, I read through all the get-to-know-you surveys the kids filled out at orientation. More than half of them listed “talking to new people” and “getting lost in the hallway” as their top worries, way ahead of tests or homework. But I also counted 22 kids who wrote that they wanted to see more mental health support in school, and 18 who said they hoped we could talk more about climate change and social issues in class. That’s not something I saw from incoming freshmen 10 years ago. This cohort grew up talking openly about hard things, because they lived through a hard thing together. They don’t pretend everything is fine when it’s not, which is a skill most of us spend decades trying to learn.
I was walking out to the parking lot after orientation ended, and I saw Milo and his mom leaning against their minivan. He’d written his locker combination in blue sharpie on the back of his hand, and they were laughing about how he’d already forgotten it once in the gym. He was showing her the mini school spirit keychain he got from the PTA table, twisting it back and forth on his backpack zipper.
I don’t know how this school year is going to go. There will be kids who skip lunch to sit in the bathroom because the cafeteria is too overwhelming. There will be missed assignments and forgotten books and days where no one wants to speak up out loud. But there will also be kids who ask the questions no one else will, who advocate for themselves and their friends without being shy about it, who bring a new kind of honesty to our classrooms that we didn’t know we needed. This fall, the Class of 2030 isn’t coming to high school as a problem to fix. They’re just a group of 14-year-olds with different experiences than the classes that came before them. All we have to do is meet them where they are, one small adjustment at a time.
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