00:00I know it's challenging right now with COVID-19 and so many people are starting their freshman
00:11year in college and not being able to to leave the nest, not being able to experience life on
00:16their own, go on campus and do all of these fun things, but you know this is a moment in time
00:22and I'm one who I always look for the silver lining. COVID-19 has had a tremendous impact on
00:28the day-to-day operations of Benedict College and its sister historically black colleges across
00:33the country. We've really had to do a lot of pivots and I want to salute our faculty, our staff,
00:40and our students in the pivot that they had to make in the spring. We've really had to have the
00:46entire community of UAPD pulled together for the benefit of our students. We're all expected to
00:55develop contingency plans to open our universities to accommodate students in face-to-face classroom
01:01instruction, living in our residence halls and the like. Being a student during a pandemic is
01:07close to indescribable. It's something that no one has ever experienced to this level before and
01:15being a nursing student in a pandemic I think is a whole another separate category. It has been
01:21challenging but it's better than it was in the spring when after spring break we just couldn't go back.
01:27For Jackson State University to just take those months of you know from spring break to the summer
01:33and just implementing all of these different plans that we can have during the fall means a lot and
01:41you know Jackson State definitely puts our safety first. Certainly the initial evacuation of the campus in
01:47March to respond to COVID-19 was a disruption of our family. Our students were displaced from their
01:53homes, the campuses they call home, and distributed back to their respective communities. My school made
01:59it optional to return to campus. I decided to stay home just for my safety. We pivoted to a hybrid
02:08in-person and virtual learning environment. Many of my fellow student body has moved off campus or stayed home.
02:17And we knew this was going to be a challenging time as the pandemic was having a very significant impact
02:24on the lives of families, on business and industry, and certainly again on higher education.
02:31Homecoming of course was no exception to our virtual new environment. We had to adapt to a virtual
02:38homecoming this year so Benedict celebrated its anniversary classes. I think that HBCU students
02:44especially are so resilient to be able to continue to push through this and as we're just living in a
02:52pandemic and transitioning to a completely different style of college education. Our administrators, our
02:59faculty, our staff, and our students have come together in a phenomenal picture of really community.
03:06And so we made the best of a very difficult situation, which is really what HBCUs always do. We do more with less,
03:13we persevere under the most difficult circumstances. You know, in my day, if you didn't physically have
03:20something on your campus, if you didn't physically have this major, then you couldn't do it. Now I feel
03:25that it's opening up new doors and new avenues for how to teach and expanding that. So I feel that they're really,
03:32unfortunately, they feel like kind of the guinea pigs right now, but they're paving a way to broaden the
03:38scope of education and how people can learn.
