Southeast Missouri State University student publication

Cost-cutting decisions means reduced space for on-campus housing

Monday, August 19, 2019

Returning students may notice something different about their housing assignments this semester. Between budget concerns and declining enrollment, the Office of Residence Life had to make some changes.

Of the changes, the biggest are cuts to Resident Assistance (R.A.) staff and reduced bed spaces.

Director of Residence Life Kendra Skinner broke down the decisions behind the housing changes.

Skinner explained how in February or March, they must present a balanced budget to the Board of Regents, and outlined in this plan is a projection for the amount of students that will be signing housing contracts for the next year.

This can be difficult because the projections are based off the entire academic school year, Skinner said, so the projections end up being more like an average of what happens over the whole school year.

“What we traditionally see in August is a lot of people living in the halls but when we get to the Spring we’ve got more vacancies in the system,” Skinner said.

Skinner explained these vacancies cause issues for the Office of Residence Life because it is an auxiliary organization, meaning it does not receive funding from the institution to operate. In other words, the office generates its own revenue.

“The big driving [factors are] enrollment and our projection for occupancy,” Skinner said.

Vacancies in housing result in lost revenue for the office, Skinner said, and money-saving decisions had to be made.

One such decision was closing Dearmont Hall.

“Based off our contract numbers and what we were projecting for this year, we made the decision early that we didn’t need to have [Dearmont] open this year, and that would obviously present us with some savings, which is always nice to have,” Skinner said.

Due to Dearmont’s popularity as a single-occupancy dormitory, Skinner said the office made the decision to change Towers South to single-occupancy rooms instead of community style, cutting the population of students living in South to about 195.

“So, not only did we close Dearmont but then we cut the population of the number of students living in South in half, so that really closed off a number of beds we have available in our system for students,” Skinner said.

Towers East and North had previously been designated as first-year buildings. The plan this year is to make both those buildings mixed-class buildings.

Now, there will no longer be a whole building dedicated to first-year students. Instead, Towers North and West will have all even-numbered floors dedicated to first-year students.

Towers West used to be designated for returning students. This year, it will also house students from mixed classes.

Skinner said they did some consolidating with some of the Greek chapters living on Greek Hill this year and opened up half of H building. There were some students who didn’t have assignments yet, and when residence life staff looked closer, they noticed many of these students had majors in the STEM field, so they created a science-integrated community.

Changes were also made in staffing.

“We needed to make some decisions to help balance our budget to reduce our R.A. staff,” Skinner said.

The staff for Towers North, West and South was cut in half, so there are now six staff members in each of those buildings. They live on the even-numbered floors with the first-year students and are responsible for that floor and the floor above them.

“We’ve heard from students one of the reasons they want to live off campus is because they want a little bit more freedom, so this provides a little bit of an opportunity for that,” Skinner said of the odd-numbered floors R.A.s will supervise.

Skinner noted making these decisions are not easy, and sometimes she even looks back and wonders if she made the right decision. However, one thing she said is important to everyone in the Office of Residence Life is the college experience and making sure these decisions aren’t taking away from that.

“We know the kind of experience we had in college, and that’s the same kind of experience we want the students here to have,” Skinner said of her colleagues. “We wanted to make sure as we were setting these things up that students still had support from our office and don’t feel like they’re having less of an experience than somebody else.”

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