— By School News Network reporter Joanne Bailey-Boorsma — Northern High School senior Kaiden Powell had an epiphany in his junior year: Grades are important if you want to graduate. So, he made an immediate change.
“I started working harder on all my quizzes and tests and started studying more, so that way I could get those credits,” Kaiden said. “So this year, my senior year, I could have fun and do the classes I wanted to do.”
A student in Forest Hills Public Schools since kindergarten, Kaiden said his struggles began during the COVID-19 pandemic, which impacted his freshman year in high school. He struggled with online classes for the first semester and a hybrid of online and in-person for the second semester. This situation meant that Kaiden could not take some of the classes he wanted, such as wood shop.
Around the same time, Kaiden’s mother, Sally, was diagnosed with kidney failure; she died in April 2021. Kaiden said she had been his best friend and his biggest advocate, helping to assure he got the help he needed in school.
“It was still rough for me because she was like my best friend,” Kaiden said. “I didn’t realize how important high school was because when my mom was ill it kind of took all that thought away.”
Working through the grieving process while adjusting to high school, hybrid classes and moving in with his grandparents, Kaiden continued to fall further and further behind.
“Basically, I failed all my classes because of that, and then in the summer I had to retake all the classes,” Kaiden said, noting that he attended the Kent ISD’s online school MySchool@Kent and eventually did pass his freshmen classes.
“Then my sophomore year, because of the (summer) online classes, I don’t know what got my head, but I was like, ‘Oh, well, it’s okay if I do bad because I can just do summer school,’ and that was not a good mentality to have.”
Therefore, during his sophomore year, Kaiden said he blew off his homework for TV and video games while managing to scrape by in school with barely passing grades.
It was in November of his junior year that Kaiden said he began to realize that “just passing” was not good enough; he needed to apply himself and do much better.
To read more about how Kaiden overcame his struggles, attended Kent Career Tech Center and held a job, read the complete story online with School News Network.
