With the first day of the semester beginning with curtailed operations and temperatures dipping into the single digits in the week following, questions start to arise on if the college should be more mindful of the weather.
According to Keene State’s website, Curtailed Operations (which students saw occur at noon on the first day of classes) is when in-person classes are canceled and only staff deemed as “essential personnel,” are on campus. Services like the Student Center, Recreation Center and the Zorn Dining Commons remain open on curtailed operations, to name a few.
The other, much more rare, option in severe weather is a campus closure. In a campus closure, the only facilities available are limited dining services, and Campus Safety, as well as very limited student engagement staff.
While I believe that a campus closure should indeed remain extremely rare, so as to not risk a detriment to students who rely on on-campus services, I think the college should thoroughly assess when to deploy curtailed operation hours.
On the first day of classes, while it was anticipated to start snowing more heavily around the noon hour on that day, the seemingly constant flurries persisted from the mid-morning through most of the day.
For someone like me, who is a commuter student, and has to allot a non-insignificant amount of time each morning to clear off my car, defrost my windows, and shovel the driveway, planning is important to me. Outside of students like me who commute, there are many faculty and staff throughout the college who have to drive longer than I have to to get to campus.
When I saw that curtailed operations were going to begin at noon that day, I was puzzled. If you checked local public schools’ decisions that day, many opted for a full closure after having previously announced an early release day, which I believe was the right decision.
Instead, by only beginning curtailed operations at noon, there were an awkward few hours of students refreshing Canvas pages for those who had 8 a.m. or 10 a.m. classes to see if their professor had canceled class themself. The whole situation just felt very odd, especially on the very first day of classes.
As if that wasn’t enough of a less-than-warm welcome back to campus, the morning of Monday, Jan. 21, saw temperatures dip to the single digits, with a snow and ice slurry coating a notable amount of Appian Way. Except on that day there were no curtailed operations, and it is unclear to me why there were not.
I am not a weather expert by any means, but I do know that even the short walk from my car to my 8 a.m. class was dreadful.
I can appreciate the considerations of not wanting to lose accreditation hours, especially considering how short each semester is already, but at some point, there should be a line between what’s economical in terms of teaching and what is safe.
At the risk of sounding like a whiny college student who just wants to get out of class for the day, I would honestly much rather have a Zoom class on a day that required curtailed operations when possible. I do not think it is necessary or fair to professors to shift their lesson scheduling entirely or miss out on teaching material due to circumstances outside of their control.
All of this is to say that I sincerely hope the college employs strategies to ensure the safety and well-being of students above all else. It is not worth risking anyone’s personal safety to ensure that those hour and 45-minute-long blocks of in-person instruction are held.
Nathan Hope can be contacted at
nhope@kscequinox.com
