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Housing on campus, as students currently know it, is about to change.
The discussion of eliminating same sex wings and floors in residential halls has taken place, and after being presented at two open forums with little to no opposition, the issue has taken flight.
Beginning with the 2006-07 academic year, residence hall wings on campus will be coed, meaning that rooms will alternate between male and female designation on each wing of each floor of each hall.
A small percentage of the rooms will be exempt from the policy. Students who are uncomfortable with the coed arrangements can choose to live in the first floor of Gannet or Cumberland, or the basement of Hancock. These will all remain single-sex areas.
Estabrooke Hall will go untouched by the new policy until it is renovated in several years, so as not to displace anyone who lives there for the full 12 months it is open each year.
“The overriding reason we made this decision was to create stronger, better communities in our residence halls,” said Kenda Scheele, associate dean of students. “Other schools are coed throughout, and it seems to work well for them. It always seems to be spring break here before students really get to know each other, and we want to change that.”
One theory behind the alternating sex rooms is that dorm damage tends to go down when males and females live amongst one another, because both sexes tend to be neater, quieter and less destructive when around the opposite sex.
“We’re not trying to inconvenience anyone. We’re trying to make the halls a better, safer place to live,” Scheele said.
Bathrooms will remain single sex and will be allocated evenly between males and females even if that means that in some halls, such as on Hilltop, the equality will exist by the floor, rather than the wing.
The resident assistants and resident directors will get different training prior to the start of next semester, with a focus on tools for building stronger communities faster.
“Change in general is always a really hard thing on a college campus,” said Taryn Buckley, a third-year communication sciences and disorders majors and resident assistant in Aroostook Hall. “But personally I see the community growing, overall cleanliness of the hall being better, and people being more aware of their behavior. If you ask a friend who lives in this type of environment at different universities there seems to be a positive response.”
Each RA has a list of which rooms will be designated male and which rooms will be designated female, so that students wishing to stay in their current room can check this possibility with their RA.
If they can’t have the same room, housing will do its best to accommodate students with a room close to the one they desire.
After the initial changes in the fall, rooms designated to one sex will remain designated to that sex in years to follow, so the issue of students not being able to keep the same room is limited to this year.
Although there are slightly more female students enrolled at the university, there are slightly more male students who live on campus. Because of this, and other factors such as disabilities and special interest wings, like engineering or chemical-free living, there may be a few instances with two male rooms in a row, or two female rooms in a row.
A couple of other changes have been made to student housing as well.
Continuous housing, which offers students the option of staying in their hall over winter and spring breaks, will become less available.
There will only be five halls designated as continuous living halls, though those five halls will change from year to year, depending on which halls need the least repair work.
In the upcoming academic year, Hancock, Estabrooke, DTAV, Patch, York and Oxford will be the continuous living halls.
The other change involves DTAV and Patch.
Students will now need a minimum of 40 credit hours to be eligible to live in DTAV or Patch since the two units are intended for upperclassmen.
The change was made due to repeated behavioral issues that have occurred in DTAV and Patch.
Overall, there are high hopes for these changes, especially the implementation of coed floors, to greatly improve the students’ quality of residential experience.
“We think it will be a very positive experience for students,” Scheele said. “Living in a mixed gender environment is an exercise in respecting others. It will be more like an adult community.”
Bangor Daily News