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The grass and the trees are growing; the weather has warmed, and seniors are slacking. Spring is in the air. It’s hard to imagine that in less than one month, fully one fourth of Onalaska High School’s student body will walk out its doors for the last time.

But for now, Onalaska’s seniors wander the hallways, seemingly careless about the next test or their late homework. The senior class seems to have already boarded up the windows, locked the doors and put a “for sale” sign up in anticipation of college.

There is no doubt that the senior slump is a problem. Worse yet, senioritis knows no bounds, affecting seniors of all manner of GPA, ACT score and social clique. There are, however, very good reasons why the senior slump occurs.

High school is a time of growth, a time when students stop acting as children and begin acting as adults. Perhaps nothing enforces this idea more than the college process. Today’s senior is asked to make decisions that many adults would (and do) shudder at.

Should I go to the prestigious school or the one I can afford? How much debt is acceptable? Should I go where my friends go? What do I want to do with my life?

Tack on the applications themselves, clubs, sports, school, scholarships, friends and it seems no wonder that most seniors have switched over to hibernate. During a time of excitement and possibilities, most seniors have scorched themselves black by overextending.

Those on the outside see “senioritis” as laziness, a lack of drive and discipline. And, for some, it is true that their senior slump is simply a continuation of their freshmen, sophomore and junior year slumps.

Yet for many, the senior slump is a coping mechanism, a reaction to four years of deadlines, expectations, and stress. Many seniors simply can’t handle three and four hours of sleep anymore, and they rebel in a painfully predictable manner: they just stop caring.

For the first time in their lives, seniors have been asked to juggle both the weight of the adult and the high school worlds. Seniors are asked to constantly compare themselves to their peers, to prove that they are better or smarter. Seniors are asked to make decisions that have immediate and profound effects on the rest of their lives.

The senior year is at once the singularly most exciting and the most stressful event of a child’s life. So remember, that clerk at Festival who looks like the only thing that’s keeping her alive is the Starbucks clutched in her hand? She’s not having a very good year. That waiter at Perkins who forgot your ketchup? He isn’t doing too well either.

Russell Buehler is a senior at Onalaska High School.