The recent evacuation and cleaning of the Vera Hackman Apartments has led to a growing awareness of problems in other residential buildings on and off-campus.
Senior Olivia Lee lives in a Student-Directed Learning Community (SDLC) house just off campus. She lived in Hackman all summer.
Shortly after moving into her house, the refrigerator stopped working, taking some of her food with it. When her washer broke, she started taking her laundry across the street to on-campus residence halls. Lee said she and her housemates reached a point where one or more of them called Residence Life and/or Facilities Management daily to report new problems or see when ongoing ones would be fixed.
“The possibility of having to move out was in the back of our minds,” Lee said. “We figured it was pretty far-fetched since our house was just cleaned, but we don’t know how well.”
Lee and her housemates are the first group of students to live in their house. Even though everything has since been fixed or replaced, she said it was frustrating to watch workers come in and fix smaller issues while the appliances were not working.
Issues have also been reported or observed in Founders Residence Hall. One shower sprayed water through an extra pipe instead of the actual showerhead. According to a Friday, Sept. 14 email from Residence Life administrative assistant Mindy Sevcik, a lost bag of laundry was found in the A tower where displaced Hackman residents stayed.
The Hackman microbial growth and issues like those in Founders led to the creation of the new Housing Task Force. The task force is chaired by Vice President for Student Life Dr. Celestino Limas, Vice President for Administration and Finance Robert Wallett, junior Student Senate President Holly Francescone and will include four additional students. [For an update on the Hackman situation and microbial growth around campus, see page 1.]
According to an email students received Monday, Sept. 17, “the Housing Task Force will…discuss current housing conditions and ways to improve communication between residence life, facilities, administration, and students.”
Facilities Management and Construction Director Mark Zimmerman also said he wants to improve communication, especially by adapting the current work order system students use to report issues. He called transitioning to an updated version of the system “a job in the making,” since it will involve changes for workers who are set in their ways. Workers will soon use tablets to update the status of work orders, and students will be able to see those updates.
On the other side, Zimmerman listed the variety of ways students communicate housing concerns indirectly, from telling their friends to posting on the E-town Jays app. He compared this to the childhood game “Telephone” and encouraged students to contact Facilities Management directly “whether the concern is legitimate or not.”
In terms of improving the housing situation overall, Lee suggested allowing Facilities Management and Environmental Services more time to clean all summer housing before the fall semester begins. Lee said Environmental Services workers repeatedly asked her to move out of Hackman before her SDLC was ready so they could clean before fall residents arrived.
After several days of this, her parents came to help her move into her SDLC one day early.
“I don’t know how practical extra time is, but [cleaning between summer and fall] just seemed like a hectic process,” she said.
For now, renovations to other residential buildings may come from whatever funds are left over after the planned summer 2019 renovation of Hackman and the Schreiber Quadrangle.
In the meantime, Zimmerman said the overall number of work orders received has gone up since students moved back into Hackman.
“Hackman seems to have been a catalyst for students’ voices,” Residence Life Director Allison Bridgeman said.
