Ohio University Student Senate held a town hall Tuesday to address student concerns with Housing and Residence Life and Facilities and Maintenance Management.
The Senate sent a survey to undergraduate students after returning from winter break to find out what issues they have on campus. Student Senate President Megan Handle said a majority of the responses were about light quality on campus, accessibility issues for those with physical disabilities, trouble getting maintenance to their dorms, trouble accessing housing for roommate concerns and room selection.
Jneanne Hacker, executive director of Housing and Residence Life, Troy Bonte, interim associate vice president of facilities management and Chris Owens, director for housing capital and facilities planning, presented to address concerns on campus.
“It is our responsibility to ensure that we're investing in our physical assets in our processes and our services and our experiences and resources and the way to promote the best of student residential and campus experience,” Hacker said.
Hacker said 10 buildings on campus are fully compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act, or ADA. These have ADA-accessible rooms, bathrooms, spaces and elevators that reach every floor,
Hacker said four buildings have ADA rooms and are ADA compliant but may not be completely user-friendly to those with disabilities. For example, Jefferson Hall is ADA-compliant, but people using a wheelchair cannot navigate from one end of the first floor to the other.
“We will always customize a placement for any student who has a documented disability, and that is important because what we know is students who have had a documented disability when they transition, they don't want their identity to be about that disability,” Hacker said.
Hacker also discussed concerns about the difficulty of room selection. She said it is a randomized process to ensure every student has an equal opportunity to select a campus room.
“We invite students to come to have good conversations in regards to how we assign selection positions, but what happens is we want to make sure that each and every student has an equal opportunity to be first or unfortunately last,” Hacker said.
Hacker also mentioned developments to ensure students also have an inclusive and accessible experience on campus, which includes the implementation of assistance animals in dormitories and cost reduction of singles for those with a documented disability and people who come from lower socioeconomic backgrounds.
Hacker said costs for singles were reduced by about 17%, which is unheard of at other universities.
In response to maintenance concerns, Bonte provided a breakdown of the maintenance schedule of when specific areas of residence halls and how many work orders are received by maintenance each week.
“Our average number of work hours per work order is three 3.12 hours or a little over three hours,” Bonte said. “Average work order requests per week is 989 … we complete about six or seven more than that, 995.”
Bonte also encouraged students to contact facilities directly for any maintenance issues or recognize those keeping up with work orders in a residence hall.
Owens then spoke about OU’s master housing plan and the capital construction projects that will take place on South Green.
Some of the details of the construction highlighted in the presentation included the construction of a 591-bed dormitory, accessibility to the entrance of the buildings, natural lighting and student engagement spaces within residence halls on South Green.
Owens showed renderings of the building and the surrounding outdoor spaces for student engagement to give an idea of what the building will look like, but the planning is subject to change upon construction.
“There's connectors and a lot of glass that's intentional for a lot of reasons,” Owens said. “It serves a couple of purposes. It brings in natural light and allows that natural light to come into space.”
Owens said this is a one-way housing and residence life that will provide natural light components into dormitories, which is the student feedback they received.
Another aspect of the construction is to provide spaces for students to engage with one another through communal living areas that are accessible to anyone on campus, but also contain privacy within the communal areas.
“We heard from students that they want a space to make telehealth calls to make their own FaceTime calls without their roommate so that space will fit one person to go and do those things,” Owens said.
Construction is expected to be complete by August 2026, and do one hall of the Front Four, Pickering, Brown, Crawford and McKinnon, at a time and take offline each year until the construction is complete.
