Frank Paquette is an artist and an athlete, as well as a hiker
and a history buff. He’s an Eagle Scout, an AP Scholar and he’s been an altar
server since the fourth grade.
His senior year at St. Paul VI Catholic High School in Fairfax
had been proceeding as planned — until the coronavirus hit, throwing the world
into a tailspin.
It’s been “a crazy few weeks,” Paquette acknowledged, and his
life looks like a big question mark right now — will the Class of 2020 be able
to celebrate their graduation? Where will he go to college? Will campuses even
be open by this fall?
But he’s trying to stay upbeat and appreciate the remainder of
his senior year — the school’s last in Fairfax before it moves to a new campus
in Chantilly in August.
“Nobody was prepared for this,” he said. “But I think the way our
school has reacted has been the best we could have wished for. The
administration is staying very much in contact with students, they didn’t just
forget about us. Nobody has ever done this, and I think everyone is learning as
they go.”
He’s been accepted to college at Georgetown University in
Washington, where his older brother is a student, and he also just heard he got
off the waiting list at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana. He’s attracted
to the school’s strong Catholic culture but had never even visited. In normal
times, “a lot of people would be going and touring colleges to make a
decision,” but the pandemic has “flipped the whole college admissions thing on
its head. I’ve been finding it difficult to truly decide what I’m going to do.”
His family — he’s the second oldest of five kids — has been
supportive. His dad, a urologist at Inova Fairfax Hospital, surprised him by
jumping in the car with him and his older brother to make the 10-hour drive to
Indiana to at least look at the shuttered Notre Dame campus so it would feel a
little more real. “We walked around and didn’t touch anything, then drove back
that day,” he said. “It’s not often your schedule allows a random weekend road
trip.”
Last year, Paquette was voted the student to most exemplify a
spirit of community involvement and service. He thinks of Paul VI as “not just
a place where we learn or do sports. We are a community, a family of welcoming
people,” he said. “We come to grow.”
He’s tried to do that by exploring a lot of different interests
and service opportunities. He’s finally taking classes in art, a longtime
interest. He’s been involved in traditional sports including track, swimming
and soccer, but also is president of the hiking club, where he’s made new
friends who “might feel sporting events are just not their scene.” He’s
president of the history club, whose Columbus Day party “game” was a debate on
whether the holiday should become Indigenous People’s Day, as some have
proposed.
For an Eagle Scout project a couple of years ago, he planned and
supervised construction of outdoor Stations of the Cross at his parish, Our
Lady of Good Counsel in Vienna — a huge
project that taught him “I can do what I actually put my mind to,” he said.
Being an Eagle Scout is important to him because it tells people about his
character: “They can trust me to be a person of integrity that they can rely
on.”
The people he trusts and looks up to are “cheerful and genuine,
authentic in their faith and in their lives,” Paquette said. “You meet someone
like that and think ‘I want to be like that person.’ ”
He’s not exactly sure what his college major or career path will
look like — “that’s the big question I get a lot at this point in my life,” he
said. But he is “involved and in touch with my faith” and is considering “some
sort of theology-philosophy route eventually,” or perhaps missionary work,
which he experienced last year on a mission trip to Bánica in the Dominican
Republic, where he used his art skills to design and paint a mural on a chapel
wall.
For now, he’s trying to count his blessings and be grateful for
those senior year memories the pandemic can’t take away — like when he stopped by school the other day
to pick up his cap and gown, and decided to put them on and take one last lap
around the track.
“I was just playing around, but it was the last time I was
probably ever going to be on that track,” Paquette said. “It was a beautiful
moment.”
