Cheney Hall will re-open for move-in week for students needing on-campus housing, barring their selection from a waitlist.

The decision by the university and Residence Life came about two weeks prior to the beginning of the 2017-2018 academic year after unusual circumstances for the Office of Residence Life than previous years were discovered.

The waitlist for students applying for housing consists of students who applied in the past week. All available space on campus has been filled, causing university officials to consider re-opening Cheney.

Cheney Hall was closed prior to the start of the fall 2015 semester when foundation and structural issues were discovered, forcing 85 students to relocate as the academic year was set to begin.

Repairs were made to the foundation last fall, however, the building still needed to be brought up to modern building codes.

“We discovered that we had more accepted housing contracts for this academic year than we had space for in the system we were planning to use for this academic year,” Dr. Kendra Skinner, Director of Residence Life said.

This discovery by Residence Life caused the department to find out what offline spaces could be brought back online or reused for student housing.

Skinner said when those spaces were brought back online and there still were not enough spaces for contracts, the decision was made to bring Cheney back online as “temporary overflow” for the fall 2017 semester.

The situation that led to this was described as a “perfect storm” of out-of-the-ordinary circumstances for Residence Life.

The 2016-2017 academic year saw a larger freshman class than before, and this academic year will see an even larger freshman class.

Another problem is there are more returning students moving back into the residence halls.

Skinner said the trend had been noticed and watched for months and they expected in July, when bills were sent, that a number of students would cancel contracts, typically due to decisions to move off campus.

However, there were not as many cancellations as there normally were to be expected, which, according to Skinner, caused Residence Life to become concerned with its ability to provide for students who requested to live on campus.

Once the university, Residence Life and Facilities Management agreed on re-opening Cheney, the appropriate groups needed were mobilized to get Cheney ready to house students.

Cleaning services and Facilities descended on the residence hall and began doing all they could in terms of touch-ups, turning the water back on and fixing up anything that was in need for the hall to be appropriate and safe to house students.

Because of this dramatic effort to reopen the hall that had been closed for almost three years, early-arrival students were assigned temporary rooms in Cheney for the coming semester.

The waitlist applies only to returning students who meet the requirements to potentially live off-campus and who decided to return to campus in the past week for any reason.

Skinner said the likelihood of those on the waitlist getting into a room “changes daily,” although the chances have increased from “not good” to somewhat better as cancellations started to come through, while requests from those who need to live on campus and those who have the ability to live off campus continue to come in.

“I’m feeling positive about their ability to get into housing, if not before opening, then very soon after we open,” Skinner said.

With this situation, Residence Life expects residence halls to be at capacity this coming semester, which will mean room change requests will not be entertained until the situation settles.

Residence Life still anticipates a number of students to leave their space to live off campus, change universities and so on during the first few weeks of the semester. Skinner said this will help ease the pressure off of the filled-to-capacity halls.

For that reason, Skinner said Cheney Hall is expected to be a temporary semester solution and that come spring 2018, Residence Life will move those who are in Cheney to other residence halls that have openings come about this semester.

Residence assistants were informed there would be a possibility of them taking on a roommate if the situation called for it. However, Skinner said the chances of this were initially 50 percent, but are now decreasing every day. The only chance now of this would be for early arrivals if Cheney needs extra time to get that student’s room online, but that would likely last only a few days, according to Skinner.

Skinner and Residence Life is confident Cheney will only be needed for fall 2017, despite summer trends not panning out, as first semester trends are fairly reliable.

Residence Life expects many students in housing to have study abroad opportunities, graduate,find internships and so on, which traditionally has been as high as 250 students from beginning of the fall semester to the beginning of spring semester.

Cheney is to be a holdover for students until they can be relocated in other halls that were prepared for the academic year. Therefore, if Residence Life officials can move all students in Cheney to other halls prior to the end of semester, they will attempt to do so to take Cheney back offline.

Future plans for Cheney for the following academic year have yet to be decided.