Editorial: It’s hard to discover gold in a snow storm

By Staff

February 25, 2013

After a giant snow storm, discovering gold could have waited until Monday.

Students were relieved last Thursday when they awoke to cancelled classes, but the day after the storm Western decided to reopen. Despite snow-covered roads and highways, Western made the decision to ask students’ to gamble their safety and make the trek to school.

As reported by many students, class attendance was extremely low. Some professors even cancelled classes. While on campus students didn’t have an excuse not to go to their classes, commuter students were not taken into consideration.

If a commuter student was able to make it to campus, it was a risk they took. The Missouri Department of Transportation’s northwest region still had all the highways in their district covered with snow. Around 9:30 a.m. a semi-truck jack-knifed on I-29 shutting down both southbound lanes. Additionally, road conditions in the morning were so bad that the University had to close the north entrance to campus off of Faraon.

Besides the risk commuter students took, all students suffered from Western decision to keep campus open. It was a lose-lose situation all around.

Professors that didn’t cancelled classes on Friday has two choices. They could either move forward with their class content or hold their curriculum because the majority of the class didn’t show up.

If they moved forward, the students that couldn’t make it on campus suffered because they missed material. If the professors didn’t move forward, then the students risked their safety for no reason.

Essentially, Friday was a wasted day. It was damaging for students to attend. We are glad that no one was injured while getting to campus Friday, but the risk never should have been taken especially since the low attendance caused the benefit of education to suffer.

When so many other institutions of learning are cancelling in our region, Western administration needs to take a cue; cancel classes.

Education is important, but not worth the risk of property damage, injury or even death in circumstances that make those outcomes much more worse. In the future, Western needs to be more open to cancelling classes sooner and more often. Snow storms don’t come frequently, especially one’s as severe as the storm that came last week.