Since the start of the fall semester, students living on-campus in different dorms have faced multiple difficulties with issues such as power outage, flooding, cold water and more. This has been disrupting basic, required amenities.
Director of Housing and Residential Life, Rebecca Peterson, spoke on how busy it gets into managing 18 resident halls and seven apartment buildings with over 4,500 bed spaces throughout the semester.
Bats flying around in dorm hallways became a prevalent issue at the beginning of the semester.
“To speak of the bats issue, we’ve had an instance of three or four bats in Binnewies Hall, but that has been it for the entire year,” Peterson said. “…and so, if there are more, it would be helpful to hear from our residents.”
Peterson explained about conditions under which bats enter dorm building such as windows left open in a day room or common spaces and potentially enter through other small places. With temperatures decreasing, bats may eventually find their way in.
Schultz, Hyde, Ben Reifel and Honors Hall were faced with issues with ice cold water running through showers for multiple weeks.
Maven Moore, a sophomore aviation major residing in Schultz Hall, recalls issues she had faced with hot water. Moore said that she received emails from Residential Life saying, ‘it would be fixed quickly’ and notified community assistants about placing work orders for the same.
“It seems like they [residential life] try to find a quick solution rather than a long-term solution,” Moore said. “With our hot water, we’ve received several issues in the past month making it very difficult to assume a normal living condition.”
Matea Gordon, a sophomore business economics major, also residing in Schultz Hall shared instances of inconsistency in functioning of washer and dryers on all four floors, causing almost 72 students having to share two washers and dryers.
Gordon elaborated on the difficulties of alternative suggestions provided by residential life of avoiding the use of shower stalls during peak hours, which caused major inconveniences. Gordon also acknowledged the hard work put in by the residential life to figure out a problem, but also believes that a small issue too could be taken seriously.
“Multiple students had to get their parents involved for them to finally listen to us,” Gordon said. “While we may be students, we were trying to advocate for ourselves and the issue wasn’t getting resolved, unless it takes dozens of kids to reach out three or four more times till the issue needs to be looked at.”
Peterson clarified the timeline of the cold-water issues with these halls and spoke on what steps were taken to eradicate these issues.
“We attempted to resolve it over a course of several weeks,” Peterson said. “We worked with campus facilities and services and what was happening was that it was an intermittent water issue and so cold water was flowing back into the system, making the showers cold and we couldn’t figure out where this was coming from.”
Peterson further elaborated on various solutions to eradicate the cold-water issue such as replacing the failed pump, working on re-circulation lines and changing shower valves. However, none of these solutions worked as Peterson clarified that the main issue was the check valves and eventually ended up taking several weeks to identify the issue.
Over the course of this duration, residential life sent out e-mails to students suggesting temporary solutions.
“We tried to keep them updated about the hot water issue with regular communications, especially with the outages and when we attempted to check certain showers and shut off hot water to see what was occurring,” Peterson said.
Hansen Hall faced water outages during the semester too. Peterson spelled out that the outage was planned as the water main was being replaced due to facility staff’s initial assessment of finding issues with pipes that needed extensive repairs.
“The hard part about working in housing right, like you dig into a pipe, and it could be something small and you can fix it, and everything is resolved,” Peterson said. “…but you could also dig in and see that it’s a much bigger issue and we want to resolve things as quickly as possible.”
Peterson alluded that Mathews Hall faced heat issues as the building electricity went off balance and electricians re-balanced that load to ensure that residents had power.
Although issues arise in different dorms on-campus, at times, these issues get resolved later than expected due to staffing issues.
“I’ll be candid, we do not have enough, and we need more staff,” Peterson said. “We’re down to less senior building maintenance workers here in housing, we continue to be down on facility workers, and we have contracted with Intek, so we work really hard to recruit and retain our staff, both student staff and full-time employees.”
Peterson further elaborated that budgeting issues do not affect the timeline of repairs in residential halls on-campus.
“Housing is funded through student room fees,” Peterson said. “We address maintenance and repair issues as they come up and it may take us longer to get to something because we are short staffed, but our team works incredibly hard to resolve the priority issues first and so we focus on that life safety piece.”
Issues raised on dorm living conditions this year brought out questions on how often complaints are received, and if they have increased gradually over the years.
“No, I think it’s just different like Pierson Hall was behind schedule so that impacted it, I think us being short, staffed impacts it and then the pervasive hot water issues took us a lot of time to figure out where the issue was and how to resolve it,” Peterson said. “When you’re focusing on a major crisis like that, it takes away all the staff resources and then you’re not able to get the other work that needs to be done.”
Peterson assured that issues would get resolved as soon as possible and also wishes for residents to have a better living lifestyle experience.
“We try and make things right for our residents,” Peterson said. “We want our residents to have a really good experience and I know that we’ve had a rocky start, and we’re committed to improving things and we’re committed to making things better.”
