As the winter season begins in Maine, concerns around navigation in the winter once again arise. Snow, sleet, black ice and freezing rain are just a few key concerns Mainers face on their daily commutes. These can make traveling both on and off foot hazardous. Proper footwear is a necessity to avoid slips and proper car maintenance is equally important.
The winter can be a dangerous time on campus for many. Falling is a huge injury risk. There are also many issues of accessibility impacting the general quality of life for students with disabilities. These range from minor inconveniences to major impediments on learning, such as accessible entrances not being properly shoveled and salted. Many wheelchair ramps on campus have ended up neglected. Proper salting and shoveling is crucial to ensuring students can get to class safely.
Safety concerns when traveling are also present in the winter. Commuting students and staff both have to travel on frozen and sometimes unplowed roads to get to campus in the morning when classes aren’t cancelled. Students have had to walk to classes in weather that neared -50 °F with windchill calculated. Official statements were put out telling students to stay inside for as long as possible and to minimize wind exposure, but classes were still mandated. The decision to delay or cancel classes is not one without ramifications, since classes are always affected by a change in schedule, but it’s one that sometimes must be necessarily made for the safety of students. Sometimes, snow days are not called even though conditions may still be quite dangerous.
Safety must be a primary concern for the University in the winter. There are steps the University can take to properly protect students and provide a safe campus for students to learn. First, proper shoveling and salting must be a priority. Accessible entrances should be prioritized. There must be a response to snow as soon as possible. Once conditions start to become slippery, salt should be laid immediately.
There should also be a push for other ways to keep students from needing to travel without drastically harming education. The implementation of remote online days is a step that could be taken to minimize travel in the winter on days where conditions are bordering on dangerous but not quite extreme. I don’t want this to take the place of regular full day cancellations, but they could be implemented on the days that are bad but not quite bad enough to entail possible outages. This would allow students to carry on with their education from home on days where travel isn’t ideal.
The pandemic taught us a valuable lesson when it comes to conducting classes from afar. While it’s obviously not ideal over long periods of time, an occasional day of remote work and learning has been proven to be possible. Our faculty have had experience teaching in these conditions. So much of the student learning experience is already online. Paper textbooks and homework assignments are being faded out. The infrastructure is almost there. Regardless of whatever solution the University would choose, it’s important to keep prioritizing safety in the winter.
