Being a Lakeland College commuter is not always a picnic; there are icy roads, limited parking in faraway spots, late night commutes on dark country roads, and exceedingly early mornings sometimes begun before even the sun has fully awaken.
The drives can range from ten minutes to two hours one way, depending on the student, but these are sacrifices commuter students are willing to make, for an array of personal reasons, in order to acquire an education.
But imagine waking up a bit late and being in a mad dash to get on the road, only to arrive and discover the institution has closed for the day, and you forgot to log onto Muskie Central for class cancellation information.
The above scenario could mean an entirely spoiled day for many commuters as their on-campus friends rejoice; a commuter could have wasted a lot of money on gas or even a lot of time if their commute spans close to an hour. Perhaps they paid a babysitter already, or turned down a work shift they could have taken, or lost precious time to catch up on homework and to spend with family.
Furthermore, if the school closed due to snow—as is often the case—that commuter may have risked her life to come to school, braving the snowstorm.
Text updates or even simply an automatic phone message from the college telling students of the closure could prevent a lot of heartache amongst the commuter community—not to mention faculty and staff who often arrive quite early in the morning.
While most commuters check the website religiously for updates, there are scenarios when that is simply not possible. There are the more disorganized and self-inflicted reasons, such as getting up a bit too late and being in too much of a rush, but there are also more sympathetic circumstances.
Perhaps a person has a particularly long commute and is on the road before the standard 6 a.m. cancellation postings, or has children to attend to in the mornings, or simply from deductive reasoning figured that since the school did not cancel morning classes for mild flurries a week ago there should be no reason to do so for the same reason this week.
Furthermore, even the most careful planner who checks My.Lakeland just before leaving cannot account for cancellations that are posted online soon after he or she heads out the door. Sometimes the cancellations are not posted by 6 a.m., and in some instances the commuter simply has to leave before 6 a.m. in order to make it to school on time in the midst of harsh winter weather.
A simple text or automatic voice message to a student’s phone could ensure against the catastrophe of making the entire commute to school without reason; after all, who looks down at their phones more than college students? Even the busy mom with children or the early morning student already on the road could hear the message alert and pause what they are doing to check.
Not everyone has the ability to boot up their computers and log on to My.Lakeland to check for cancellations. Some commuters aren’t even fortunate enough to have internet access at their residences. And certainly the majority of students do not have app-enabled cell phones for accessing Lakeland’s MuskieMobile app.
But one thing that all cell phones do have these days is texting. Commuter students have phones with texting. Faculty and staff have phones with texting. Creating text alerts for school closings and delays should not be grueling or expensive for administrators to carry out—at the very least sending the messages and text alerts to all commuter students on record. After all, even elementary schools send parents an automatic message when closing; there is no reason Lakeland should not be able to do the same.
If the school is seriously considering investing in condom machines that benefit only specific on-campus residents, there should be no objection to the financially smaller investment of text alerts and automatic voice messages for their commuter students that would actually benefit commuters’ academic success and save them a lot of money, time, and heartache.