Opening that Safety Notice email about adverse weather conditions is always easily the highlight of any day. How could it not be? You plan for a typical day filled with classes and tests and assignments, and with the power of one email, suddenly the only thing that matters is how pretty the snow looks in your Instagram post and how many episodes you can finish on Netflix before it all melts. The excitement that snow days bring is the spoonful of sugar that helps college students smile a little extra in the midst of an inevitably stressful week. Everyone loves a day off, but poor weather conditions need to be handled more efficiently.
Having grown up in New Jersey, I’m used to salt being on the ground before the storm starts and the roads being plowed before the storm even stops. If you had to, you could travel while it’s still snowing and be able to get around for the most part. So far after being in North Carolina for two winters, it seems like a few snowflakes alone can make driving conditions nearly impossible and dangerous. Due to lack of plows and methods to clean up the snow, it’s more difficult for Southern states to handle winter storms. We still need to invest in them, despite their seasonal use. Of course, it is smart to prepare before a storm and gather everything you may need so that you don’t have to venture outside, but in case of an emergency, there should be more of an initiative to make the campus, community and city safer.
Safety aside, dealing with snowstorms in an efficient and timely manner is especially important for college students. Unlike my Jersey high school, snow days aren’t made up at the end of the semester in college. In other words, that’s a really expensive day that you just paid for and got nothing out of. Time is money, and no one likes to waste money.
At the college level, it’s expected that students can learn the missed lesson on their own and still be held accountable for that material. But let’s face it, students are in college to learn because they aren’t experts yet. The professors at NC State have so much knowledge and many educational experiences that all factor into the student’s greater potential of understanding that would be impossible to obtain by reading the textbook on its own. It’s a shame that the Wolfpack has to miss out on an opportunity to learn from NC State’s very best faculty members, even if it only would have been an hour or so. As the spring semester goes on, those hours add up as snow days accumulate along with delays and early closings.
After getting only an inch, more or less, of snow and ice this past weekend, we had a closing on Friday and still had a delay on Monday. Three whole days later, conditions still weren’t safe enough to open for classes. Parts of campus were covered in sheets of ice all weekend, and with more salt and other precautions, the slippery sidewalks and icy roads could have been cleared up sooner. Sometimes I honestly wonder if people even own shovels here in the South. If so, it doesn’t show.
There’s nothing we can do to stop snowflakes from falling but there’s a lot that can be done in order to make sure that it is handled in the best way possible. With more equipment and efficiency, each snowstorm won’t have such a prolonged impact. A snow day here and there seems perfect to me, but there should be an effort taken to prevent lasting consequences from the same one inch of snow. It’s always awesome to get that “classes are canceled” email, but let’s hope that this semester there aren’t too many so that we can get the most out of our education.
