Being a Sunnyside High School Grizzly is nothing short of an experience. The second you step foot on campus during a typical school year, you can feel the excitement. You are surrounded by some of the smartest, most athletic, creative and musically inclined kids in the area. Students will constantly hear the story of how our graduation rate climbed from the worst to one of the best in the state. We will hear announcements every morning that always end in athletic director David Martinez saying “Have a great Grizzly day!” Students are greeted kindly by the secretaries whenever we go into the main office or the counseling office. You will probably hear people referring to us as Grizzly Nation. Students will have the line “It don’t matter where we go, we’ll always find a way back home” stuck in their head from the song “Back Home” by Andy Grammar. Sunnyside students will have “The Big 3 (Connect, Build and Envision)” and “Grizzly P.O.W.E.R. (Perseverance, Ownership, We before Me, Excellence and Respect)” ingrained in our head forever. And we will have chanted “We Are SHS” and our fight song about a million times by the time we graduate. At Sunnyside, students may fail, but then always remember to win the day. Students have an amazing support system at SHS. We will stay up until dawn doing our project for honors bio or the science fair. We anticipate hearing mariachi coming down the hallways on a teacher’s birthday. In every assembly we attend, students will probably strive to beat the senior class but I don’t think that has ever happened whether anyone may think they deserved it or not. We get dressed up for the holiday lunch and enjoy the amazing meal and caroling done by our Mr. SHS contestants. Traditionally, we go to spring fling in Marquez Plaza, followed by the luau a few weeks later. We go to basketball games and wrestling matches and experience the school and community coming together once again. Students and the community understand the change of energy at events without the band, cheer or dance groups. Students might cry during finals week, but at one point or another we find ourselves talking to a staff member, and they tell us to “Give yourself a little grace.” Or we may slip up and Martinez tells us, “Hey, you’re better than that” and somehow these words seem to set us back on the right track. Most important, the younger students ignore their upperclassmen friends when they say the years in high school will fly by. Truth is, they do. I encourage students to take advantage of every single second. Each year, students attend our moving up assembly and cry when all of the senior friends leave. Between then and the last day of school, students take more pictures than their camera can hold. At the end of spring, the Sunnyside community attends graduation and many will probably end up standing because there are so many people. Students in our high school will watch this process three times … until the day of being in that cap and gown. That’s a time when students may reminisce on the “good ole days,” even though that the time of nervously attending freshman orientation feels like it was just yesterday. Though we are still unsure of what this 2020-21 school year may hold, as a school we are working hard to still make some of our traditions possible. Science fair will be virtual and we have already had two virtual assemblies, and will do so with the Veterans Day assembly that’s on the way. In these unforeseen circumstances, I have realized that I took it all for granted and I know I speak on behalf of a lot of students about that. COVID-19 has changed everything, but I know that we are strong enough to make stuff happen and stay connected even when we are apart. No matter what the situation is this fall, we are family. We are home. We are SHS. Olivia Puente is a senior at Sunnyside High School.