You may find yourself scrolling endlessly past the notifications on your phone telling you that you received an email from your school account. Some may not even know how to even navigate to their student email accounts. Even though it may seem tedious, checking school emails is one of the most vital forms of communication still connecting us from school to home.

Before this pandemic forced us into distance learning, I’ll admit, school emails did not really serve a great purpose. I never even checked it. However, flash forward to us being sent home from school, and I’m frantically trying to learn how to access my student email account just to ask my math teacher a question on the homework. Or, maybe I need help with a subject and the only way to schedule a Zoom meeting with a teacher is by student email. Simple questions that could’ve been asked a few minutes after class now have to be answered through student email. 

In a recent poll sent out to students on the Quest News Instagram Page, we asked how many students actually checked their student emails. A whopping 53% of the 81 students who answered said they do not check their student emails. Although this does not represent the whole student population, over half of this group of students not checking their student emails should be a matter of concern.

Though, it’s understandable that many Don Lugo students did not even know we had a school email. Even less, that the only way to access it was through the Microsoft Outlook application. Plus, the Outlook app gives notifications for everything. For instance, it gives a notification every time a teacher posts an assignment. Every. Single. One. And, everyone should know by now that teachers post a lot of assignments every day. However, if you can sail past all of the emails that aren’t really essential, you will reap the benefits of continuously checking your student email. When the Don Lugo Yearbook sends you a notification that they want you to be in the yearbook. When your student counselor wants to clarify something about your schedule. Or, when you need to get in touch with a classmate with whom you don’t have any contact information.

This pandemic changed many things about our lives, and not all of these changes were welcomed with open arms, like having to check student emails constantly. However, there are benefits to checking them, especially with so much uncertainty in the air. It’s nice to have one thing for sure: that having access to school email accounts is a guaranteed form of communication between home and school.