COVID 5 Years Later Series P5
- Shidonna Raven
- Mar 3
- 2 min read
By Jeremy Olson
MARCH 6, 2025
Source: The Minnesota Star Tribune
Photo / Image Source: Unsplash,
HOW COVID-19 CHANGED MINNESOTANS
A kickboxing nurse, a dancer who hopes to walk again, and a defiant bar owner reflect how the pandemic changed lives in Minnesota.
Keeping schools closed
The lockdowns had limited impact on slowing the virus' spread, said Michael Osterholm, director of the U’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy. Government officials were never going to be able to keep them in place long enough to stymie the coronavirus, he said. Lockdowns also receive too much blame, considering the first one was scaled back in two months and didn’t apply to the majority of Minnesota workers with jobs deemed essential.
But the school closures had consequences. Given only weeks to launch online classrooms in spring 2020, schools struggled to maintain student learning.
A state with some of the best test scores in the U.S. saw only 44% of students meet math proficiency standards in 2021, a decline of 11 percentage points from pre-pandemic results. And scores haven’t rebounded.
Kadee Watkins recalled getting a message from another mother who was observing an online classroom in 2020 for their Orono first-graders.
“What’s [your daughter] doing with those scissors?” the mother asked. Watkins turned in shock to see her daughter cutting her hair on camera.
Watkins, 49, had taken time off as a physician assistant to be a stay-at-home mother. She opted to homeschool her two grade-school daughters instead of continuing with online instruction: “It took just a few days and I was like, ‘All right, this isn’t working.‘”
Online learning had some benefits during the pandemic, making students self-reliant and tech savvy, but it caused them to miss out on social interactions that are vital for emotional growth and development during the grade school years, said Rebecca Jackson, a vice president of Brain Balance, a training program that seeks to boost cognitive function. The North Carolina-based organization has a clinic in Woodbury that has been helping children since the pandemic.
Children can catch up with practice, but many ended up years behind in cognitive development and were then placed in situations for which they weren’t prepared, she said. “We’re still getting our driver’s licenses at the same age and all of those things.”
The pandemic proved oddly beneficial for Watkins, allowing the single mother to bond with her four children on road trips across Minnesota and forcing them to deal with unresolved stresses in their family.
Watkins was motivated by the experience to switch careers, becoming a financial adviser with training in helping clients manage divorces.
It was a happy ending that was taboo to discuss during the pandemic as others faced illnesses or even deaths, she said. “So many other people were really struggling.”
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