by Kathryn Magura Krieger and Camille Perlman
Carol Binzer, director of administrative and support services at Texas A&M University, summed up the campus housing mission when she said that the true essence of student housing is not just the fact that students live on campus: It’s how staff work to make that experience life-changing no matter what outside factors come into play. Like few other occasions, the COVID-19 pandemic has tested the resilience of campus housing departments and students alike. However, it has also served both as a reminder of the type of commitment Binzer described and as an opportunity to reimagine how campuses meet their mission. As shown in the first part of this story, housing departments were forced to rethink how they approached many of their operations. As they made the necessary changes to address the immediate health and safety concerns, they also needed to consider changes to be made as campuses move forward.
At the beginning of 2021, the Talking Stick sent out a call to members asking them to comment on how their business operations and processes had changed or had been reimagined in the past year. Though some of the changes may be temporary, others remain as innovative processes that can be woven into the new normal.
Staffing: Along with having to navigate employee furloughs and lay-offs, new teams of people were assembled on many campuses to exclusively handle COVID-19 and pandemic-related questions. Alexander Trout, area coordinator for resident services at Kansas State University, notes that they created a team with two full-time employees and two hourly staff to handle all quarantine needs for their residents. “We deployed this team to create a systematic approach throughout our university in collaboration with the Lafene Health Center and the Office of Student Life (Dean’s office).” This team managed meal deliveries and rides for students to and from the health center and advised students who had just arrived on campus. “This team required additional collaboration with our in-house dining operations as well as information technology. IT was able to build a quarantine/isolation information system for our team, on the go, as needs arose. The development and implementation of this process was very quick (in under two weeks it was fully operational).” With this set-up, they were prepared to keep some level of quarantine housing for fall semester.
The staff at the University of Washington teamed up as well. “One of the changes I made was to initiate a cross-functional team to develop strategies and responses to COVID-19-related communications,” says Deborah Costar, associate director of communications and marketing for housing and residence life. Their team included staff from communications and marketing, the Student Services Office (housing applications and assignments), residential life, and dining. “The team proved to be very effective in helping us respond to the changing environment and high volume of communications needs with timely responses and a coordinated departmental approach.” The team continues to be a valuable resource and “has evolved into an ongoing content team in which we discuss and coordinate COVID-19 communications, as well as housing marketing strategy and other pertinent topics. As part of our weekly standing agenda items, we discuss what we’re hearing from students on social media and through our residential life team.” And she confirms that this team is here to stay. “I plan to continue this team for the long term, and I have support to do so. As part of a pandemic learning opportunity exercise that our department coordinated, the communications and marketing team identified this cross-functional team for content strategy as one of the things we would like to maintain post-pandemic.”
At the beginning of the pandemic, the business, IT, and HR staffs at the University of Iowa were set up to work remotely and were given a flexible schedule. “We hadn’t done it before, but it worked very well for our business staff who aren’t student-facing,” says Von Stange, assistant vice president for student life and senior director, university housing and dining. “We were able to allow our student staff in our main office suite to work remotely while retaining their ability to respond to phone calls from customers and reply to emails. This made our students feel very comfortable, and they appreciated that we were able to accommodate.” Stange says they will soon be assessing these changes. “The university will be doing a pilot study regarding remote working (likely in a hybrid model) during the fall semester to determine effectiveness and gauge how remote working will be handled in the future. Regarding student staff, we are bringing them back into the office for the most part, but we are allowing them to work remotely after hours or on weekends to answer emails from parents and students.”
The front desk is typically one of the first places students can put names to the faces of the people they will be living with for the year. But this past year students saw these areas vacant or their operation drastically reduced. At St. Thomas University, they shifted the times and the locations of their desk operations in order to better accommodate students. As Deighton Edwards, residence supervisor, notes, “As a residence life professional team, we recognized that having students in residence who were unable to access our main campus spaces for most of the year meant a lot of students weren’t interacting with any professional staff. We were worried that students would feel like they didn’t have access to the same supports without that consistent face-to-face time. We also saw a need for support after office hours and before on-call started – those few hours where there never seems to be anyone to answer your questions. To help combat both of these barriers, our team decided to take turns time shifting and location shifting so that every day of the week there was someone available until 8 p.m. and working within an accessible office space within our residence buildings.” Although students responded very well to this, Edwards says the lease expired in May on the building they used primarily for desk operations, and they plan to centralize their locations a bit more for the upcoming semester in buildings that are right outside their administration building.
The team at St. Thomas also changed up their on-call duty to be more available to students. “Working within a small institution, we learned early on we would always be considered essential. We also knew it was critical that as professional staff we didn’t burn out. As a professional team of two residence supervisors and one assistant director of residence life, we switched our single-person on-call rotation to a rotating group on-call system. We each take turns being first, second, and third on the list. We are always on the list, and if our student staff can’t reach the first person on call, they move to the second, and then the third,” says Edwards. While this allows professional staff to support each other and takes some stress out of being on-call, they feel it doesn’t involve the student staff enough. As Edwards explains, “For on-call, we’re currently exploring how to structure it best with student staff duty. We found that last year student staff may have not been involved enough in intervention around COVID violations (not wearing a mask, having guests, etc.). This caused a high level of reliance on professional staff to automatically deal with COVID-specific issues. We found our approach of escalation and skipping student staff didn’t help their worries about COVID regulations or spread but actually caused them to feel even more out of control. Our hope is to take what we learned from this previous year and structure on-call and student staff duty to empower students to keep peers accountable, to ensure that each person feels more responsible for their role in the community and that our involvement as professional staff is more one of support than intervention. Our on-call structure is still under revision, but we think this approach will still help us have more balance in our schedule and work/life balance.”
Student Behavior: With new health and safety regulations, on top of the abnormal conditions student residents had to face, student conduct procedures had to be explored. Without being able to bring everyone together for meetings in person, several campuses took this time to move their conduct process online. Shannon Staten, executive director of university housing at Florida State University, says that all interactions with students concerning behavior and all pieces of the conduct process (conduct meetings, judicial panels, etc.) have been virtual since March of 2020. At Kansas State, their hearing agreement form was migrated into an online form in March of 2020. Referring to a software system that centralizes student conduct records, Trout explains, “We utilized Maxient’s routing rules to send the complete form directly to the hearing officer,” says Trout. “For health and safety violations in our apartment community, we integrated notification letters and the appeals process fully into Maxient. This resulted in a quick turn-around process.” Trout adds that they will keep this process online after the pandemic.
Dining: Dining facilities and operations originally designed to host hundreds, if not thousands, of students each day had to quickly convert their operations to pick-up only. Many campuses arranged for food to be delivered or handed to students upon their arrival to ease their transition to campus at a time when everything was in flux. As AJ Place, associate dean of student life at Middlebury College, explains, “Our dining teams did an excellent job providing a bag of groceries and food for students upon arrival and then delivering to rooms as students had to go right to room quarantine after arriving until they received a day zero negative test.” Trout says that at Kansas State, “As restrictions lessened, dining made changes for additional food to be picked up, allowed in-person dining, and even had touchless condiment dispensers.” And at Iowa, Stange says, “Dining changed to express dining (a form of grab and go) for most of the year. We will be keeping a form of express dining with reusable take-out containers.”
Maintenance: Finally, dealing with the COVID-19 virus put an increased focus on the work of maintenance and custodial crews. Most of their daily responsibilities focused on keeping the surfaces of common areas sanitized, while students were responsible for cleaning their own bathrooms. At Colorado State University, “Members of our environmental services and maintenance team were trained on additional cleaning equipment, cleansers, and strategies to handle quarantine space as well as other areas of our facilities,” says John Malsam, associate director of university housing. With less time scheduled for bathroom cleaning, staff had more time to do major and minor repairs across campus. And with students centralized in certain halls, staff had more access to empty rooms to get in and get the work done quickly. On some campuses, maintenance departments hired staff who had been let go from other departments, such as conference services or dining, which were scaling back because there were fewer students on campus.
Staff at Kansas State took this time to streamline processes for the future. “We transitioned to electronic room condition status for residence halls,” says Trout. They finalized integration of their apartments into this system during the Spring 2021 semester. At the University of Iowa, Stange says they are considering extending the application of an antimicrobial they have used on all surfaces since the beginning of the pandemic to applications over future summer and winter breaks.
While some of these changes have proven to be so successful that they have been adopted as the new process going forward, staff will continue to make further refinements. Change is constant in student housing even without a life-altering experience like a pandemic. But the commitment to serving students remains a constant as well.
Kathryn Magura Krieger is the assistant director of operations at Oregon State University in Corvallis. Camille Perlman is the managing editor of Talking Stick at the ACUHO-I Home Office in Columbus, Ohio.
