Snow Trails
While students might have spent Feb. 12 getting ready for the next day’s snow day, university Facilities Management workers had other things on their minds.
About 200 workers cleared, plowed and shoveled through about 10 inches of snow to keep campus roads and walkways safe over the weekend, said William Monan, associate director of landscape and arboretum and horticultural services.
Even before the storm started, Facilities Management began working to monitor the storm and help ensure everyone could safely leave the campus, said Harry Teabout, executive director of building and landscape maintenance.
“We don’t want to wait for the snow to come to us,” he said. “We want to be there when it hits so we can get the roads cleared as soon as possible.”
Before the storm, Monan estimated workers sprinkled about 20 tons of an ice-melting chemical throughout the campus and placed 100 tons of salt on roads.
Maintenance workers labored through the Feb. 13 snowstorm to clean the sidewalks with tractors, plow the parking lots and shovel snow off smaller parts of the campus, such as steps and bike racks.
In most cases, road conditions are the deciding factor for school cancelations. Teabout said. A second storm that sprinkled several more inches of snow on the cleared roads motivated university Provost Mary Ann Rankin’s decision to cancel Friday classes for a second snow day.
“The main roads were fine if you could get to them,” Teabout said.
Those conditions would have caused just a delay, he said, but the extra snowfall Thursday night meant workers would need more time to clear the snow.
Now, as temperatures rise and the snow melts, the impact of two missed school days has yet to be determined. The University System of Maryland has no plans to extend the school year or enforce any strict guidelines for professors, said system spokesman Mike Lurie.
Lurie said the system, which mandates the number of days per year member schools must hold classes, hasn’t historically altered its schedules because of snow. A 2010 blizzard that caused a six-day cancelation of classes didn’t impact the length of the spring semester.
According to the of the provost’s office, the university required teachers to use online tools or reschedule classes to make up time instead of adding more school days.
Architecture professor Powell Draper said the curriculum’s unexpected delay caused some difficulties in his class, but they were manageable.
“It’s tough to miss a class, especially if the class only meets once a week, but email and other technology make it somewhat easier to make sure everyone is on track,” he said.
Draper also said he disliked having days off in the beginning of the semester, when classes are trying “to build momentum” with the essential material.
Freshman journalism major Thomas Church, who missed five classes on Thursday, said his teachers used electronic tools to keep students up to date.
“I had two teachers who decided to just skip what we were going to do and made us just depend on readings,” he said. “But I had a lab on Thursday, too, and I know my class is behind an entire day of work, and I‘m not sure how we catch up exactly,”
