By Lindsay Renner, Copy Editor
Saint Leo students may have been alarmed a little over a week ago to receive an email from Residence Life regarding the institution of weekly walkthroughs to observe the conditions of the residence halls on campus. Many thought that this meant weekly room inspections from Residence Life, conducted under the guise of maintenance issues.
This, however, is simply not the case, as was originally feared.
According to Sean VanGuilder, Associate Director of Residence Life, there is a much less sinister reason for these weekly walkthroughs. “We wanted to follow up on work orders, and identify issues with the exterior of the building,” says VanGuilder. “For example, I walked around Building Four once, and observed about 15-20 wasps nests, so it’s just different things like that that we need to clean up.”
However, because of the sheer amount of students on campus, there is not the possibility of Residence Life and Maintenance examining every single building on campus on a weekly basis within the hour time slot allotted for these walkthroughs, which are conducted between 9 and 10 AM on Thursday mornings. “We only do one building a week,” says VanGuilder. “It’s a way to be proactive.” The last building to be examined was Henderson Hall, where VanGuilder says their walkthrough identified an issue that affected the entire building. “While walking through Henderson, we discovered that the cable for the entire building was cut. This was discovered during our morning walk, and because we found it early, we were able to get it fixed within a matter of hours,” says VanGuilder.
Even with the examination of just one building a week, an endeavor such as this can still prove to be time consuming. To save some time, VanGuilder says that those conducting the walkthrough will only go to student rooms where a work order has been issued and fulfilled within the last several weeks. Student rooms will not be entered if there has been no work done.If a student is not present to answer the door, the staff will not enter the room. As VanGuilder says, “We hope to improve the quality within residence halls…Student satisfaction is important. (A walkthrough) gives students a chance to voice their concerns. It opens up a face to face dialogue for both maintenance and residence life, and gives us a face as well.”
If students wish to contact Residence Life further with any questions, they need look no further than Sean VanGuilder, who can be reached at sean.vanguilder@saintleo.edu.
