OPINION

DARNELL Managing Editor

BOSTON Lifestyles Editor

Use it or lose it: Your brain rots in the summer

THE ALESTLE STAFF editorial board

WELTZIN Illustrator MYLEE WALKER Reporter

UDIT NALUKALA Photographer

TAMMY MERRETT Program Director ANGIE TROUT Office Manager

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Learning is a priceless tool that will always help someone get through life. No matter what the situation is, the more knowledgeable you are, the more likely you are to succeed. That is why keeping your brain active is so important.

As a child, you looked forward to the two to three months of summer vacation. Things couldn’t get much betterno teachers, no homework and no tests. During summer, kids only have to do what they want to do, except for chores. With a world full of ice cream and no deadlines, life couldn’t get any better.

Despite a child’s viewpoint, life goes on outside of the usual August to May school year. Learning and living do not get a vacation, and this is something that parents should be aware of. It isn’t a child’s duty to look out for their future; it is your responsibility as a parent or guardian to make sure your growing child retains the information that you paid for them to learn. Even if you do not have a student of your own at home, it is important to retain information from the college courses that you have spent thousands of dollars on. Losing information across the non-stimulating summer months is very common among students. In fact, this phenomenon is so common that it has been coined as “Summer Learning Loss”. One institution that has studied this phenomenon is Brown University. In their recent study, “School’s Out: The Role of Summers in Understanding Achievement Disparities,” which took place in 2020, researchers found that students first grade through eighth lose up to 34 percent of the knowledge gained in the school year during summer months.

Scores in the areas of reading and math tended to be the scores that dropped the most. The aforementioned study did not collect data on what exactly children were doing during their summer, but most parents would tell you that it wasn’t math. Most children would rather play in the sprinklers outside than sit in the living room and read the latest edition of their favorite trilogy or do multiplication at the dinner table.

While you don’t need your child to read a trilogy in the summer or even do multiplication every night before dinner, another study by Brown University shows that participating in summer programs allows students to bet- ter retain knowledge. In the study, “The Impact of Summer Learning Programs on Low-Income Children’s Mathematics Achievement: A Meta-Analysis” done in April 2021, researchers found that students who took summer programs were more likely to remember school year information. Summer courses can even benefit college students. Courses are a worthy investment to ensure that they don’t forget what will ultimately get them through the rest of their schooling. Even if students cannot afford summer courses, at-home work booklets are available as a cheaper option. Retaining information is just as important as learning new things. So this summer, make sure to enter your student (or yourself) in some summer courses to keep your brain active and knowledge flowing.

SIUE is in Tornado Alley — Dorms need better storm shelters

HEMBROUGH editor-in-chief

Imagine you are in your dorm room late at night reading a book, and, all of a sudden, you hear tornado sirens.

You get an e-Lert saying a tornado warning has been issued for Madison County.

Where do you go?

The first-year residential halls are all three stories tall. Evergreen is four. In Woodland, the space designated as a storm shelter was the first-floor bathroom.

A bathroom is generally a decent place to take shelter during extreme weather events.

between 400 and 435 students at any given time. Of course, this number can also fluctuate with guests.

With that taken into account, the little bathrooms on the first floor of each dorm hall are not adequate for tornado safety.

There is never a guarantee that someone will be completely safe during a tornado, as they are violent and unpredictable phenomena, but for an area that should be well-acquainted with tornado safety, SIUE seems to do the bare minimum when it comes to keeping students safe during extreme weather.

The procedure also says to go to safe areas marked with “Storm Shelter” signs. However, there is no real guide as to where these safe areas are, aside from a few scattered PDFs online.

Anything written in safety procedures doesn’t matter if it’s not implemented properly. I was on an assignment for The Alestle on April 15 at the Center for Spirituality and Sustainability when a tornado warning was issued over Madison County. We took shelter in the gallery, an interior room that was below ground level. I felt safe there.

rooms are a decent place to take shelter, fourth-floor bathrooms are not. The National Weather Service instructs people to go to the lowest floor they possibly can during a tornado. SIUE’s own safety procedures do too: “If safe areas are not posted, go immediately to the basement or to an inner hall of a lower floor.”

So, why was our multimedia editor sent back up to the fourth floor?

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In buildings with no basement, the first-floor bathroom is usually the ideal spot, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. According to the housing department, each first-year residential hall can house up to 500 students if all rooms are fully occupied. While this is rarely the case, first-year residential halls tend to house

The University Safety and Emergency Procedures acknowledges the threat of tornadoes. It also gives some very basic information as to what people on campus should do in the event of a tornado. For instance, the alert is “a long, wavering, intermittent blast of sirens located both outside and within the core buildings.”

At the same time, our multimedia editor, who lived in Evergreen Hall, was sent all the way up to his fourth-floor bathroom. When speaking with him about this, he said that in the past, Housing had no plan when there was a tornado threat, and improvised by sending everyone to the ground floor. However, their plan on April 15 was to send students back to their rooms.

While ground-level bath-

A combination of flawed safety plans, bad communication and inadequate shelter space can all lead to a deadly outcome. SIUE is lucky to have avoided such a disaster so far.

Infrastructure damage from a tornado is pretty much unavoidable, but measures can be taken to protect the lives of students, faculty and staff. The fact that SIUE has not invested more into storm safety is a troubling sign, and one that could come back to bite the university if a tornado plows through campus itself.