Graduating during an evacuation? 'It'll be OK,' says former Fort McMurray evacuee
'When you're in it, it feels like the end of the world ... everything will happen as it's supposed to happen'
With thousands of people fleeing their homes to escape wildfires burning across northern Alberta, some former Fort McMurray high schoolers are thinking about their time graduating during a wildfire evacuation.
Abigail Weavers was in Grade 12 at Westwood Community High School when a wildfire forced more than 80,000 people to flee Fort McMurray in 2016.
Many other students decided not to go to school that day, but Abigail did because she didn't want to risk an unexcused absence.
She said she had just finished gym class when suddenly "everybody was in a panic."
Weavers and her cousin got in her car, picked up their siblings and drove home. The family had to leave that night as Fort McMurray was evacuated and residents weren't able to return home for six weeks.
Weavers said she was worried about her education because she had been planning to go to university to become a nurse and didn't know how the evacuation was going to affect that plan.
Universities were accepting students' marks as is, so Weavers didn't finish writing her diploma exams.
"At the time I would have written anything they wanted me to write as long as I could get into school," she said.
She was accepted to schools in Calgary and Fort McMurray. Before the fire she was planning on going to school in Calgary, but after the fire she choose to stay in Fort McMurray. She's now going into her fourth year of nursing at Keyano College.
"I didn't want to leave again," she said.
Weavers said she doesn't know any students who are currently under evacuation order, but having been through one herself, she has a lot of empathy for them.
"It's terrible," she said. "When you're in it, it feels like the end of the world … your future, but everything will happen as it's supposed to happen.
"For me, it wasn't a bad thing the way things worked out."
Weavers said she thinks that most of her peers would agree that their plans weren't hindered by the fire.
"It's hard to see it at the time, but it'll be OK. It will."
Another former Westwood student, Tamanna Haque, took a different approach after the fire.
During the evacuation, Haque decided she would finish the year with homeschooling.
She finished all her final exams and projects and finished the school year with a high average to make sure she would be eligible for scholarships.
"I think I actually did much better in those classes being self-motivated than I would have done if I was in school," she said.
She said her home-school teachers were amazing and she enlisted the help of a tutor to get her through calculus.
Now she's in the midst of an environmental engineering degree at the University of Alberta.
Despite their successes, both Weavers and Haque said they felt a little cheated about graduation.
"I definitely look back and I'm nostalgic on having missed out on a lot of basic school experiences. I never really got to do grad week or make T-shirts, or enjoy my grad," said Haque.
"At the end of the day I knew that high school graduation wasn't going to be my peak and … it wasn't the end of the world."