Community living has some major updates and plans for this semester and heading into fall.
With the demolition of two dorm areas and with students picking their housing for the next school year, community living has been working to improve the campus.
Katherine Bain, the assistant director of transitions and community living, provided her input on the upcoming changes.
“Coming up over the next few months, there’s going to be some work being done inside of Owls Nest 6 and 7,” Bain said. “As they get ready for the stages to demolish the buildings this summer, we anticipate that there’s going to be an increase in activity within that area of campus, but the demolition itself, like any of the loud noises, are not going to be occurring until after the students leave.”
Bain went on to explain what the empty space is going to be used for.
“Right now it’s going to be greenspace,” Bain said. “So it will be another great opportunity for students to go out and hang out.”
Bain also provided some insight about the email Community Director Kevin Ingram sent to residents regarding smoking in the Owl Nest dorms.
“We were notified of the recurring trend in the Owl’s nests dorms and of a weird smell,” Bain said. “If a student was caught with something they weren’t supposed to have, we would need to proceed with community standards policies. The rules state that students have to be twenty-five feet away from the buildings to smoke. Smoking isn’t allowed in places like stairways or passageways. However, since the email was sent out, we have had no further issues with it.”
Casey Justice, the director of transitions and community living, provided her input on how she hopes demolishing Owl’s Nests 6 and 7 will benefit students.
“Hopefully it will give students more space,” Justice said. “Especially as the weather gets nicer and the snow melts.”
Justice also elaborated on how the housing system is set up this year, with students currently undergoing the process of picking their dorms for the next school year.
“We have moved to a new housing system,” Justice said. “So the students that had selected in the fall, the juniors and seniors, actually did housing selection in our old system. Our rising sophomores and then any other students that haven’t selected are using our new housing portal.”
Justice explained that the change was due to the fact that the new portal is much more student-friendly than the previous one. It can also be used both on students’ phones or computers.
“So far it seems to have worked very well,” Justice continued. “We didn’t have a lot of questions from students about filling out their application. We have selection times from 9 a.m. until 1 p.m. and students had to form groups, so they assign a group leader and that group leader gets to select at the earliest selection time out of everyone in their group.”
Justice also explained why demolishing Owls Nest 6 and 7 will not affect student housing.
“Our housing capacity has been pretty stable,” Justice said. “We still have the ability to continue housing even if more juniors and seniors elect to stay on campus. We have the space for them. We haven’t actually utilized 6 or 7 in quite a few years. In an effort to not have to worry about deferred maintenance on those buildings and trying to keep them up to standards, it makes sense institutionally for the college to remove those buildings at this time. Again, to allow [for an] area for more students [to] utilize.”
Evren McTygue, a rising sophomore, shared some of the troubles they had with the housing portal.
“My biggest issue with the housing selection process was that you couldn’t select rooms in suites with like a larger number of people in them if that makes sense,” McTygue said. McTygue thought that it made things more complicated for students to not be able to choose suites that had more rooms available than the amount of people in the groups students formed.
“I think it could improve if that was fixed but also the time was shortened as all of the suites were gone by like 10 to 11 am,” McTygue added.
Tagora Mortensen, also a rising sophomore, provided his input on the housing situation.
“The website was pretty confusing to navigate honestly,” Mortensen said. “I wish it would’ve shown me more information. The ‘my booking’ tab didn’t even appear when I got the room at first.”
Mortensen added that he thought a way the housing selection process could be improved would simply be giving students more information to prevent stress.
“They did okay. I wish their emails were less vague and they could’ve given people better timeslots cause if you were after 9:05, you barely got anything,” Mortensen went on. “We were so lucky to have an early time slot.”
Chloe Erno can be contacted at
cerno@kscequinox.com
