I recently sat down with Parrish Eiskamp, the Dean of students here at BMU,  to talk about how Covid has affected him from last year to this year, as well as how he feels it has affected the school as a whole. Eiskamp said,  “It was very much like playing with a yo-yo. One day we are at school, the next we are not, and that basically continued all year.  From an educational standpoint I feel that all children have missed out on so much that it is really going to be hard for everyone to get back that lost time. This is the situation across the country. I also think that we as a school have taken some positive steps to try to ensure that our students don’t continue to fall behind. I would say that the biggest difference for me from last year to this year is that masks have become less of a disciplinary issue.”

When asked how Covid might affect us in the future, Eiskamp replied, “I do think that people getting vaccinated has helped put some minds at ease but with the most recent variant that could change. It is my understanding that we may have to live with COVID forever but not in such an extreme way . . . My hope is that we are able to learn to live with COVID as something that is only experienced seasonally and without drastic numbers of lives lost.”