David Lewis was just a few credits shy of earning his associate’s degree in journalism from Long Beach City College when the pandemic hit.
Lewis, 29, was already encountering scheduling conflicts between his classes and a new job at Trader Joe’s. As the assignments for his online classes started to pile up, he struggled to keep pace. In March, he left school.
It was a difficult choice because he’d returned to college just months before, determined to fulfill a promise he’d made to his mother before she passed away from cancer.