by Maria Mantini ’26 on February 5, 2026
Opinion - Campus
On Jan. 25, I watched from my window as mounds of snow began to accumulate all over campus and visibility lowered to a cloudy white haze. With classes canceled for the next day, this was a prime day to catch up with friends, binge watch the show you’ve been meaning to start, or grab whatever you could find in your dorm and go sledding down the Guzman Hall hill. By the end of the day, the snow was knee-deep. After the snowfall continued into Monday, parts of Rhode Island were left covered in 11.5–20 inches of snow.
By Tuesday, the college was able to hold classes and most pathways had been salted and cleared off. However, there was one blaring exception to the college’s clean-up efforts: the student parking lots. A quick walk through any student lot on campus proved that cars that were parked before the storm were still parked there a few days later, unable to move from the mounds of snow that surrounded them.
My friend is currently a full-time student teacher at a local elementary school. After a virtual teaching day on Monday, we walked to the Hunt-Cavanagh Lot to check on her car and it was clear that she would not be able to drive it the next day. The snow surrounding the car was over a foot deep and extended more than a foot behind it. While plows had come through to clear open parts of the lot, no effort had been made to remove the snow near any of the cars.
Relying on her car to get to student teaching, she went to the Office of Public Safety to ask when the lots would be cleared, to which the answer was a firm, “we don’t know.” This lapse in effort on the part of the college caused her to miss student teaching on Tuesday (a day she will have to make up later in the semester) and take an Uber to her school on Wednesday. Other student teachers expressed similar concerns about their ability to travel and even their reputations for having to miss work. Providence College should not be preventing students from being able to attend something that is part of their required course of studies.
With faculty lots largely cleared, it seems that the priority in the clean up was the college’s ability to hold classes as soon as possible. My friend received no communication from Public Safety or the Office of Transportation about what to do or what the timeline was for clearing the lots. She even mentioned to me that she wouldn’t mind shoveling out her own car if the college provided shovels. Instead, she was left desperately asking around for one, not anticipating beforehand that this would be a problem. Her car was not cleared out until Wednesday night.
With the $400 students are paying a year to park on campus, the lack of attention and communication about this matter is appalling. Many students do not keep cars on campus just for fun, but rather rely on them to get to student teaching, jobs, nursing clinicals, or other obligations. It is understandable that the college would need some time to get snow cleared away after a storm of this magnitude, but the student lots were cleared days after the rest of campus was. The least Providence College could have done was communicate the plans to their students. By not making an effort to assist with this matter and giving no clear timeline for this work to be done, the school is making a stark statement that these student interests are a low priority.