As a student who commutes to and from campus, there is a lot of bad I can say.

Parking on campus is terrible. Roads in Grand Forks in January are awful no matter how nice the weather is. Walking and bike riding more than a mile are out of the question due to the dangerous temperatures that are commonplace from December to April. But my biggest issue with being a commuter on campus comes from the way snow and blizzards are handled.

We don’t often get snow days at UND. I understand that calling off school throws everything out of whack — from individual classes to the university as a whole. In simple terms, we can only have so many snow days a semester before we lose ground as a school. No one is being cruel when keeping school in session — as much as we like to curse the powers that be that decide we’ll be having school on the days of high winds and huge drifts.

But I can’t lie, the emails we get a few times a semester saying in the first paragraph that UND will remain open during the storm and in the next tell us not to drive unless absolutely necessary, they feel like a slap in the face. It’s a catch-22: Stay at home and risk my grade since all but a few of my classes have attendance policies or get on the road and potentially risk my life.

Having lived my life in the Midwest, I have experience driving in winter weather. I lived in the country during high school, 20 about miles away from my South Dakota school. There were days when roads were so bad I had no choice but to turn around and head back home. I know what bad roads are like, how to drive safely on them and when it’s too slick or drifted to drive.

Ice under snow allows for no traction for wheels, leaving the car with very limited control. Visibility from blowing snow hides all but the closest things, be it deer, landmarks or other cars. When I moved up here, I thought it would be better inside of city limits, but I was wrong. It can get just as bad.

Walking around on campus during all but the worst blizzards is no big deal. It’s not fun by any means, but it is doable. Getting to campus in blizzards, however, is downright dangerous. It’s easy to forget that not all students live in campus dorms. It seems UND forgets to take these students into account when designing it’s procedures for weather that is bad, but not quite bad enough to call school off.

Just as the school takes its classes seriously, so do I. If school is in session on the day of a bad snowstorm or blizzard, I will do everything I can to get there. But even in town, roads are often bad and visibility is near zero. I don’t want to know what it’s like for students and staff who commute from out of town in that kind of weather.

Here is what I propose: blizzard days. The university and the school remain open, but attendance policies get a mandatory rewrite on blizzard days. Basically, missing school on a blizzard day cannot and will not hurt your grade in anyway.

This way, teachers can still hold class if they like. The school doesn’t need to worry about messing up the number of days we have in-school and students don’t need to worry about driving through winter conditions that are downright deadly.

We live in North Dakota, in the city that always makes the lists designating the coldest cities with the worst winters. I’d be insane and self-indulgent if I begged for a snow day or a relaxation of policies every time there was a little drifting on the roads.

In a way, we North Dakotans are proud of our ability to zip up our parkas and shovel out the driveway in subzero temperatures, but we are not superhuman. Even we hardy Northerners have a limit to what we can achieve — and that includes driving in severe weather.

Kjerstine Trooien is a staff writer for The Dakota Student. She can be reached at [email protected].