As a student who works for the grounds crew removing snow I find this article to be very inaccurate. While Ms. Nahrwold is waiting for an e-mail to hear if her class is canceled at eight in the morning, students like myself have already been shoveling the snow from doorways for nearly an hour for minimum wage. Often times we have to shovel off the entrances to buildings multiple times within a couple of hours. A coworker and myself one day shoveled off the entrance to the administration building four or five times before lunch during winter break. Employees who work full time are usually at work and clearing sidewalks at five in the morning after staying late the previous night. I, for one, work very hard to clear doorways because I know that I will be using them later in the day. As for hoping classes will be canceled, on Tuesday I actually had a professor in the afternoon cancel our class because of the weather then on Thursday, our next meeting, this professor admitted that the conditions were not bad enough for class to be canceled. Everyone involved is working as hard as they can to remove the snow, and a sad fact is often times it is coming down faster than what we can remove it even with specialized equipment. Both part time and full time employees work hard at snow removal in addition to performing routine campus work such as changing the trash containers on campus. As for Ms. Nahrwold's allegations about McKinley, I personally have never had a problem with driving down that road at any time of the day. Her allegations that it was worse than county roads are way off base also. I have lived in the country on a county road as well, and the campus roads are in much better shape than the road I lived was. It isn't even close. As a student who lives off campus and must make at least a twenty minute walk to any of my classes, I have noticed that there is a significant difference on how well the campus sidewalks have been cleared and how the off campus ones have. In my five years of attending this university and the three years I have spent off campus, I have never felt that there has been a problem with the snow removal. This includes the time before I worked with the landscape services crew and had no personal ties to the matter. I find it very offensive that a student to bash several individuals who work very hard to clear the snow to make their walk as comfortable and safe as possible just because they, as they admitted earlier in their article, did not want to attend class. It is not fair to the full time employees and it is not fair to the students like myself who work hard in the cold to remove the snow.
Read More
Letter to the Editor: Black women belong
By Contributor / March 31, 2021Recollecting on my own experience at Ball State, as a Black woman and a first-generation college student, no one warned me in advance that I would and should be responsible for making my education my own.
Letter to the Editor: Black Ball
By Contributor / February 25, 2021The story of Black students at Ball State is one of perseverance — it is a story of the Black students’ tenacity and faith in themselves, each other and the university.
Letter to the Editor: Please be patient with the university
By Contributor / March 20, 2020With all of the news and happenings with COVID-19, this is a scary time for students. We are unsure about what our future is going to look like: will we transition well to all online learning? Will we get to keep our jobs? Will we be able to pay for food, for housing, for other necessities? Will we graduate on time?
