Living in lounges

Freshman Jasmyn Lagenour pictured moving to college and making her first home away from home special.\nInstead, she is living in a dorm lounge with a closet made of two wooden poles and a steel bar.\nLagenour arrived at her residence hall to find she had no room assignment. As of Friday afternoon, 130 other students had the same problem, said Patrick Connor, halls of residence director. Connor said they are living in dorm lounges until further notice.\n"Next week we do our official check of who has showed up and who hasn't," he said. "Once we call people who haven't showed up, we believe in two or three weeks we can have everyone out."\nResidential Programs and Services is doing several things to combat the overcrowding. Two houses of Ashton Center previously closed because of a lack of need have been reopened, and several floors in Eigenmann Hall were redone to house new students.\nLagenour came to campus with a letter from RPS containing a room assignment and a roommate. But when she got to Read Center, Lagenour was told RPS lost her contract and she would have to settle for a lounge temporarily.\n"I was very upset," said Lagenour, from Jasper, Ind. "My mom didn't want to leave me here."\nShe is living in the Read-Landes fifth floor lounge with another woman. Her original room and roommate were both given to someone else. She did joke that the air conditioning and large space is one plus.\nLagenour said RPS told her it could take anywhere from two to eight weeks until she has a permanent room.\nAlthough the University has no current plans to build more on-campus living, Connor said there are other options that can be explored first.\n"We have five buildings in Ashton we are using for administrative purposes," he said. Offices of several campus groups are currently being housed there, partly because of construction in other campus buildings. It is the only space in the dorms that is not currently used for housing.\nBruce Jacobs, associate vice chancellor for administrative affairs, said new student numbers and dorm retention rates are high this year, making it a difficult task to assign everyone to a room. The freshman class is estimated to be about 6,700 students, and the retention rate for the dorms was close to 30 percent this semester. \nOverall, between 10,200 and 10,300 students will call a residence hall their home this year, almost 500 students more than last year, Connor said. \nJacobs promised in the March 20 edition of the Indiana Daily Student that there would be plenty of room to house all students on campus. \nBut Jacobs said by the end of June his office realized there would be a problem. \n"It wasn't a surprise," he said. "We probably knew about it as orientation got going.\n "Basically, we continued to get reservations in, and we've had a policy for as long as IU has had residence halls. We will not turn students away," Jacobs said. "We will not tell a student you will not have a place to live."\nSenior Jason Dudich, president of the Residence Hall Association, said people should understand RPS is doing everything they can to ensure the situation is quickly cleared up.\n"We tell them they can live in lounges, and it's up to them," Dudich said, "knowing down the road they're going to get a room."\nAfter remedying the problem this year, with even bigger freshman classes expected in the upcoming years, long-term solutions are being examined by RPS. \n"These next couple of years will be pretty crowded," Connor said. "Should we determine a ceiling for the number of rooms we give out as double singles? This year we rented out more then last year, but that was because of a bigger occupancy.\n"We basically don't have anymore space."\nDudich stressed that although an inconvenience, the overcrowding indicates the residence hall staffs are doing something right.\n"This is a positive thing. We're getting more students in," Dudich said. "More students want to live on campus."\nMeanwhile, Lagenour said she didn't expect to start the year off like this.\n"It's not as bad as I thought, but I wanted the dorm experience," she said. "I don't know when I'm going to have to move again"