High school starts in crazy ways, everyone kind of knows each other but at the same time everyone is making new friends, and is in classes with new people. New friendships are formed almost as alliances to get through the scary first year of high school, freshman year. It’s a huge change from middle school, despite many attempts by our teachers to prepare us. New students flood the hallways and class sizes double, and we are presented with a variety of different classes we may have never even known existed. Despite this being a frightening obstacle for freshmen, it is extremely exciting. Upon starting new classes and making new friends, so many clubs are brought to your attention as well, and a few very lucky freshmen in 2017 decided to join the newspaper. 

Some of the seniors saying their farewell to the newspaper staff this year joined as freshman, some as sophomores, some maybe even their senior year. I started my sophomore year, but dabbled in it freshman year. As I was a new student to Middletown, I was searching far and wide for a way to make new friends. Finding the newspaper definitely helped me do that. Throughout my three full years with the newspaper I have completely grown out of my shell and along with that I have found my creative outlet. I have the administrators at the Eagle Eye to thank. Mrs. Whitmore and Mrs. Altz have been here to help the entire staff work their way up from just new students in the Eagle Eye, to editors and staff. With that being said the staff could not begin to express our gratitude for our amazing administrators, and the time and effort they put in to help us showcase our best work. 

Our junior and senior years were obviously cut short and extremely different from other years, due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Despite not being in class or real meetings, the Eagle Eye managed to persevere. With that being said, the news became crazy, we were faced with a pandemic, riots, movements, and elections. As staff of a newspaper it is our job to cover the news, and together we found ways to do so without being too controversial. We faced some rough patches with story ideas and struggled a little bit with making our stories appropriate for our audience. Despite motivation being so easy to lose, and I will be honest, I personally was affected by this, the staff still managed to have an amazing year. 

The Eagle Eye is something that I’m sure all of our seniors will be a little bittersweet about leaving. We have all worked extremely hard in different ways, and have grown extremely close to our staff despite not really seeing them much in person. Thanks to the Eagle Eye some of us even realized we want to go into journalism as a professional career. No matter where the next parts of our lives take us, I know I personally will always remember being a part of something so special to me.. 

One last thing I’m sure all of our seniors would agree on, would be if you are reading the Eagle Eye, share it with your friends and family. The staff really does work so hard on every single piece put up, and they truly deserve more attention.