A statewide rock salt shortage is affecting the SUNY Brockport campus, leading to growing safety concerns. While this impacts all students and staff on campus, it raises significant concerns particularly for campus tour guides navigating icy walkways with large groups of prospective students and families.
In an email sent to the SUNY Brockport campus community, Assistant Vice President for Communications John Follaco informed students that due to the shortage, the facilities team would be scaling back salting efforts.
“Beginning this weekend, our grounds crew will only be able to salt our main roadways and intersections,” Follaco said. “We will not be able to salt around buildings or walkways for the foreseeable future.”
The email also warned students that there is only so much that can help with ice and urged students to “walk like a penguin” as they navigate campus in the coming days. Many students are enraged by the decision, especially considering Brockport has often been under a winter weather advisory in recent weeks.
For student tour guides like Jessica Goodis, a third year addictions and behavioral health major who has worked in admissions for two years, the change has been noticeable.
“I haven’t ever run into any issues on campus when I’ve given winter tours, but now it’s not feeling like the same as it has the past two years,” Goodis said. “I feel not as safe walking around with ice left on the sidewalks. It’s even worse with large groups of people on tour, especially when accommodating for a family that might need a wheelchair or anything of the sort.”
While providing the best campus tour experience is the ultimate goal of SUNY Brockport admissions ambassadors, weather conditions have made it increasingly difficult. Although the facilities team at Brockport cannot control the weather, many students, like Admissions Ambassador Emily Skorupski, felt off-put by the tone of the email, particularly the link to a video on how to “walk like a penguin.”
“I feel like it’s a little kind of silly,” Skorupski said. “As a tour guide, we can’t do that [walk like a penguin] if we’re supposed to be walking backwards. I don’t want to have to tell families to penguin walk on campus. It feels unsafe and inaccessible.”
Skorupski also voiced similar concerns for those who need accessibility accommodations.
“What if someone has trouble walking? What are they supposed to do in these situations?” Skorupski said.
Admissions Advisor Heather Pond has worked in the office for two and a half years after serving four years herself as an admissions ambassador. With her experience in giving tours, she acknowledged the difficulty of balancing accessibility and safety for visitors.
“When the tour groups are smaller, it’s a lot easier to accommodate and just go at their pace,” Pond said. “Versus when you have a larger group, you obviously still want to accommodate everybody and make sure that people are still keeping up, but it’s hard because you have some families who are eager to keep moving, so you have to try and balance it out.”
Pond emphasized that while the entire admissions team is honest with visitors about conditions and how the university is responding, the shortage is out of their control.
“I know that our facilities teams do work really hard to make sure that our campus is clear, but if we can’t obtain salt, we just kind of have to work with the resources we have,” Pond said.
Going forward, Pond is staying wary of the conditions but trusts her ambassadors to make smart decisions while leading tours.
“I am a little bit concerned for some guests who may come to campus, especially if they have trouble walking, especially if they’re a little bit older and may slip on the ice, or sometimes you have students who are on crutches,” Pond said. “I think that it’s just gonna be something that our ambassadors have to be more mindful about and try and take the clearest route.”
With more snow forecasted in the coming days, campus officials are urging the campus community to take extra precautions when walking outside. Unfortunately, with no time estimate as to when salt will be in abundance, admissions staff and tour guides will have to exercise increased safety measures to ensure a welcoming experience for prospective students.
