When is it Too Cold for Class?

MISHAWAKA—From 5 p.m. on Tues­day, Jan. 29 un­til 5 a.m. on Fri­day, Feb. 1, Bethel was closed due to the ex­treme tem­per­a­tures that shat­tered records across the re­gion. 

But just how ex­treme do the con­di­tions need to be for Bethel to close? 

“It’s sub­ject to change, but some­where be­tween neg­a­tive 25 and neg­a­tive 30,” said Dr. Bar­bara Belle­feuille, vice pres­i­dent of aca­d­e­mic ser­vices. “Neg­a­tive 25 would perk my ears, and I’m talk­ing about wind­chill, that would say, ‘Okay, we’d bet­ter start think­ing about this.’” 

Belle­feuille said that snow events are much more dif­fi­cult to plan for. 

“A snow event... hardly ever hap­pens the way it’s pre­dicted, un­like tem­per­a­ture,” said Belle­feuille. “It al­ways de­pends on when it starts falling... some­times they’ll say, ‘com­ing at 3 in the morn­ing,’ and then you wake up and there’s noth­ing out there.” 

Belle­feuille said that she al­ways dis­cusses ma­jor snow events with se­cu­rity, main­te­nance and the vice pres­i­dent for busi­ness ser­vices, and while the con­ver­sa­tion nor­mally starts days in ad­vance, of­ten it’s dif­fi­cult to make the call un­til the last minute. 

“I’ll be look­ing for a text as early as 5 [a.m.],” said Belle­feuille. “By the lat­est 6 o’­clock we want to make the call... there are more things than you can imag­ine that play into this.” 

Belle­feuille said that some of the things they take into con­sid­er­a­tion are road con­di­tions, cam­pus con­di­tions, sched­uled events and safety in gen­eral. 

Di­rec­tor of Cam­pus Safety Paul Neel said that while keep­ing every­one safe is their main pri­or­ity, they also un­der­stand that it can be dif­fi­cult to make up missed classes. 

“We want to keep classes go­ing if at all pos­si­ble... but we want every­body to be safe,” said Neel. 

Neel also said that stu­dents should pay at­ten­tion to the alerts sent out by Cam­pus Safety. 

“One of the big things we of­ten find though is that stu­dents will not check their Bethel mail,” said Neel. “Well, every­thing goes to your Bethel ac­count... so that’s prob­a­bly a big thing, check there, be­cause some­times we’ll get a longer mes­sage in the email... than in a short  text mes­sage.”