The 2025 school year brought Buffalo Island Central High School a new teacher: Ms. Makensie Walker. 

Walker, a former 2017 graduate of BIC,  graduated college in 2021 from Arkansas State University, where she majored in English. Her favorite subject is English because she felt the subject just clicked with her. She also loves how works from 500 years ago are still relevant to circumstances today.  For a while, she didn’t want to teach. “I just woke up one day and thought ‘maybe I do want to teach’, and so I called my sister and told her,” said Walker.

 One of the main reasons she wanted to start teaching was because of her mother. Her mother, Mrs. Murelene Walker,  taught math at the elementary school for about 25 years, and Ms.Makensie Walker feels as if she’s connected to her mom in a way by teaching at the same school as her mother.

 If she had to teach another subject, she said that she would love to teach Chemistry. “I may not be good at it, but doing the experiments seems like a lot of fun to me,” was one of her reasons. She wishes that other subjects (like English) were just as hands on as chemistry. 

 Some of her hobbies outside of school included playing Pickleball with her friends. She also enjoys going thrifting but specifically with her friend Annabelle because she’s good at finding hidden gems that most people couldn’t find. Something her students would be shocked to know about her is she loves to play Fortnite. She also has a passion for reading, and when asked what her favorite book is, she said it was the second book of the Hunger Games trilogy: Catching Fire, because no matter what age you are you can learn a valuable lesson from the book.

While a student at BIC, Mrs. Walker was heavily involved in many clubs and extracurricular activities, including being a member of the journalism staff. When she joined the thing she was most drawn to was the photography aspect of it. When she took photos for the first time, she fell in love with it, and seemed to have a natural talent for the artform.

In her time as a teacher at BIC, Mrs. Walker has noted that many changes that have taken place in her absence in the district, including a new school building, new faces, and a new four day school week. She commented that one big tradition she misses are the lip-dub videos that the EAST program used to create.