Photo Gallery: Patrolling during pandemic at UW-Superior

The campus of the University of Wisconsin-Superior should be bustling.

The weather is getting nicer. Students should be outside hanging out, walking from class to class. But they’re not.

Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, they aren’t even on campus, well most of them aren’t. There are some people on the UW-Superior campus 24 hours a day, seven days a week — campus safety workers.

“It’s a lot like summer,” said UW-Superior police sergeant Joe Eickman.

Eickman starts his day wiping down the steering wheel of the squad car before heading over to the locked buildings on campus to do a walk through. Sgt. Eickman has stopped touching door knobs of the unused classrooms and now looks for open doors instead. Essential workers are still on campus continuing their work, but those workers have keys, so the buildings are locked to the public.

The squad car now also houses N95 respirators along with latex gloves that he wears anytime he goes to the dorms on campus. Roughly 140 students still live on campus. Many of them are international students.