A big change that you may have noticed at Dimond is that we are not as restrictive with Covid prevention anymore, and it is becoming more open than it was last year. When you look around you don’t see as many of the precautions this year as you did last year. Teachers aren’t wiping down desks anymore, we aren’t staying three feet apart, and most importantly we aren’t enforcing masks. After ASD lifted the mask mandate on February 28 we saw many students choosing not to wear a mask anymore.

 When we asked Mrs. Melican, our librarian, she said “It is a lot better talking to students and being able to see their faces”. When we asked Jacob Quimel, a sophomore at Dimond, he said “I don’t notice them enforcing it as much anymore”. They have also removed the mask stand when you walk into Dimond, and it seems like both students and teachers are happier now that they can see each other’s faces.

Last year we asked Dimond’s science teacher, Mr. Campbell, about Covid and he said, “I worry that this will be the new normal”. When we re-interviewed him this year, he said, “I still believe that this will be the new normal that we will have to live in”. He still strongly believes that all the preventative measures we used last year will still work this year, but as we are aware they are no longer enforced.

Whether you decide to wear a mask or not, Covid is still something that we have to live with. We have lived in a pandemic since 2020, and people are getting tired of it. The new normal is slowly coming back and we might just have to live with this virus forever.