Bethany Darby reaches out during COVID-19 shelter-in-place

Bethany Darby is a rookie Feather staffer and this is her first article. The editors and staff welcome her to the team. She doe not yet have a profile page.

My journey starts in Los Angeles, where the city never stops. I really never stay in a city or place for too long but I share my education journey with Fresno Christian, reaching out to fellow students during COVID-19 shelter-in-place.

My mom works as a nursing home administrator and travels to different cities for bigger opportunities. My father is an entrepreneur so his business is not affected by moving.

I have moved to eight schools between grade one through nine. I have made many good friends throughout those years. Some of those people were toxic and led me down the wrong path. One thing that I’ve learned from moving schools is don’t trust everyone you think is your friend.

My family rarely stays in a place for more than two years. But I have been living in Fresno for four years in September. I have played two main sports, basketball and softball, playing basketball since sixth grade and at Clovis North last season. Basketball has been a big part of my life with my social life and health, plus it helps keep me out of trouble.

My parents have raised me for the world and what it has in store for me. I want to be a pediatric neurosurgeon when I get older and I have to go through four years of college then two years of medical school. That’s a lot of schooling and I could stop after two years of medical and become a doctor, but I want to go further and make more money. I choose this career because I love working with kids and working on the body.

I moved to Fresno in 2016 when I was in sixth grade and was the new kid at my old elementary school. I was afraid that they were not going to like me because I was new.

Moving schools is one of the scariest things any teenager can go through including in the middle of the school year. I was a public school kid and I love the freedom that a public school kid can have. But all that got taken away just like that, when I came to FCS.

I really did not choose to go to FCS; as I said before, things did not work out in public school. According to my parents, I did not talk about the Lord and that I did not hang out with the right crowd.  

I was terrified because I was a public school kid going into a private school again. I had been in a private school in fifth grade but I was used to all the public school things, not private things.

As a fifth grader I thought it was weird to wear skirts to school and go to chapel during school, but I got used to it at the end. Towards the beginning of sixth grade, I moved from Lancaster, CA, to Fresno and I started public school again.

I went to Granite Ridge for seventh and eighth grade and Clovis North for half of the first semester of freshman year. It was a big change from a school of over 4,000 kids to a school with less than 300 kids in it. I really miss Clovis North and all of my friends and some of my favorite teachers.

The transition to FCS has been rough for me leaving my friends and close teachers. One of the main reasons I’m here at FCS is that my parents did not like that Christ was taken out of the schools and that I can’t talk about it.

In public schools they have this program called FCA where the fellow Christians of the school come together every Wednesday and talk about the Lord, which I did attend most of the time.

The COVID-19 has not affected me that much. I’m not freaking out every time someone coughs. I really do like staying home and getting more free time to play games and be with family more.

Now that you’ve been at Fresno Christian, how has the transition been? What has helped? How has the COVID-19 school shutdown affected you?

For more articles, read Earth Day promotes climate change awareness, raises support through livestreams and COVID-19 outbreak forces US farms out of business, food waste dumps.

Bethany Darby can be reached via email.