To: The Wellesley Community
From: President Paula A. Johnson
Re: Action on Student Housing
Date: October 18, 2019
I hope students and faculty had a wonderful fall break and have returned refreshed and ready to take on the second half of the semester. I spent some time over the break reflecting on the start of the semester and on some of the housing issues we experienced. I want to update the community on the immediate actions we have taken to address those issues, as well as share our longer-term plans.
Let me start by emphasizing just how important housing and residential life are to our students’ experience at Wellesley. Our residence halls are where students come together to build community—living and learning with each other in ways that help develop lifelong friendships. My hope is that each residence hall provides much more than dorm rooms, and instead serves as a home away from home, a place that supports and enriches students’ academic experience, allowing them to truly flourish.
Regrettably, as the result of a confluence of factors at the start of the semester, 20 of our students did not have the room assignments they expected upon arriving on campus. These factors included human error and challenges resulting from the transition from a manual, paper-based housing selection system to a new online system, combined with facilities issues resulting from recent storm damage to several rooms and an increased demand by our students for singles.
At no point during this process were students homeless or without a bed. Students who were dissatisfied with their housing options were either relocated or placed in temporary housing. Most had permanent placements within a few days, and all were placed within two weeks thanks to the impressive work of our residential life and facilities teams.
While I am pleased with this outcome, I want to be clear that 20 students affected is 20 students too many. We can, must, and will do better.
The issues with our housing selection process this fall caused us to dig deeper to diagnose the problems we faced. They also sparked a broader discussion with students and alumnae about the condition of our residence halls. Prompted by these conversations, we have taken action on two fronts: First, we are working to address the challenges with our housing operations systems and communications; and second, we have completed a comprehensive and systematic assessment of our residence halls to give us a full understanding of the condition of the rooms and to develop a work plan to address issues we found. I want to update you on our progress on both fronts.
Improving our housing operations systems
StarRez has taken Wellesley out of the dark ages of housing selection. Until recently, Wellesley was the only one of its peers not to have transitioned to an online system. Previously, our antiquated paper system created challenges for many students and was especially burdensome to students returning from leave or study abroad. While the first-years’ move-in using StarRez this year went flawlessly, the subsequent issues we experienced revealed problems with our implementation and demonstrated the need to streamline our internal processes and establish clearer deadlines. We believe we now understand what went wrong, and we feel confident that we will not experience these problems again in the future.
Last week, Vice President and Dean of Students Sheilah Horton invited a number of housing operations experts to come to Wellesley to meet with our residential life and facilities teams and students, review our housing selection processes and procedures, and develop recommendations for improvement. Their early findings highlighted the need for us to improve both communications throughout the housing selection process and how the software and systems across the College (Workday, AIM, StarRez) that provide important data for the housing selection process are working together.
Assessing and addressing the repair needs of residence halls
When I joined the College in 2016, I became aware of the significant deferred maintenance needs of our residence halls, and I asked our student life and facilities teams to develop a plan to address the high-priority repairs. By the end of next summer, we will have spent $29 million across our residential halls. We have installed new roofs, replaced elevators, upgraded common spaces such as living rooms, TV rooms, kitchenettes, and bathrooms, and painted student rooms as well as installed new flooring. At the same time, we maintained our schedule of painting student rooms every four years. We have also removed carpet from student rooms in all but two halls; we will remove the carpet in the remaining halls next summer.
Even with these improvements, significant work remains to be done. During the first week of October, facilities and residential life staff teamed up to perform a top-to-bottom review of all 1,560 dorm rooms on campus. These inspections included both the routine health and safety checks the College does every semester as well as a complete assessment of the condition of each room, including ceilings, walls, floors, windows, and bathrooms.
This review found all of the rooms to be safe and functional. Given some of the reports that had been shared by students and alumnae, our teams were careful to check for friable asbestos and mold. The results were reassuring: They found no friable asbestos in any of the rooms, and no mold in any of the occupied rooms. Our teams tested for mold in the few rooms in which it had been reported, and those tests were negative. They did find rooms with peeling paint on the walls or ceiling, a condition generally caused by water infiltration from leaking windows or leaking pipes, and they are determining the best way to address and repair the sources of the problems to prevent recurrences. They also found that a small number of rooms required immediate cosmetic repairs (such as replacement of torn shades, paint, etc.). We plan to make these repairs over the winter break.
In addition to providing us with a reliable assessment of the dorms, this effort showed us that many students are unfamiliar with the process of submitting work orders to let the College know about problems in the halls. The facilities and residential life teams are now working together to educate staff and students about the process and to encourage proactive reporting of concerns.
We know that our residence halls are beloved by students and alumnae. We also know that these historic and beautiful buildings will continue to require repairs and renovations for many years to come—and we are committed to this task. I want to thank the students for raising this issue. I also want to thank all who have worked tirelessly to assess, diagnose, and develop a plan to address these housing issues with a sense of urgency in the short and long term. Wellesley is at its best when we come together to solve problems. We will continue to prioritize work on our residence halls this summer and going forward. There is more work to do, but I am confident that we will get it done.
