New committee looks to improve communication within Willkie

On the third floor of Willkie Quad North Tower sits a dorm room with fresh paint on the walls and new tiles hanging on the ceiling, but just a few months ago the room had been completely dismantled.

Months before that, the Willkie community had been thrown into turmoil by a sign on Gregory Willoughby’s closet door: “Warning H2S.”

In April, Willoughby was found dead in his closet, seven to 10 days after he inhaled hydrogen sulfide, a toxic chemical that is lethal when inhaled.

“We completely gutted the room,” said Jeanne Lady, Residential Operations Administration associate director for Willkie. “Because there were chemicals involved … the room had to be pretty much completely dismantled. They repainted, they pulled up floor tiles, they pulled down ceiling tiles, they pulled out all the furniture, everything from this room.”

The task, which was undertaken by Residential Programs and Services maintenance staff, was only one component of the University officials’ response to the incident.

Building a community

At the beginning of the semester RPS formed a committee to examine how to build a better sense of community within Willkie.

“The things that we had decided we wanted to do toward the end of last semester, after this had occurred, a lot of it’s about sense of community,” said Bob Weith, director of Residential Operations Administration. “And a lot of it’s about the members of those communities and whether they feel a caretaking responsibility for saying something if they haven’t seen another community member for awhile.”

Lady said both Weith and Patrick Connor, executive director of RPS, have talked about the idea of the committee for three years, but it became more of a priority after Willoughby’s death.

“This gives students the ability to say what they need rather than what we think they need,” Lady said, adding that up until this point, RPS has relied on the Willkie student government to be the genesis of changes like this. “This brings a little more structure to it.”

The committee is comprised of Weith, Lady, Willkie Residence Manager Doug Yeskie, the Willkie center president, graduate student staff members and undergraduate floor presidents.

Lady said the committee, which first met Sept. 24 and again this past Friday, has yielded some “really great discussion” about how to reconfigure public spaces in the building and also how to best monitor students and their mental health given Willkie’s higher student to staff ratio.

Lady said the committee determined that students, even those in upperclassmen buildings, do want to connect with their community.

This conclusion, she said, was based on the atypically high attendance at Willkie’s Welcome Week programs and students’ usage of what little public space Willkie does have.

One of the goals of the committee is to strike a balance between encouraging students to connect with their living community and respecting their need for privacy, particularly in Willkie, where privacy is generally the expectation.

“In any community … you want to have a balance between knowing who your neighbors are and being able to go to them if something bad happens in your own home … you want people to have that sense of ‘OK, I can come together and I can find resources and people who will help take care of me,’ but you also don’t want your neighbor looking in your kitchen window every day,” Sara Ivey Lucas, assistant director of assignments for RPS, said.

Weith said RPS could do a better job of setting an expectation for students that they let somebody know if they’re planning on being away from the building for an extended period of time. However, he said this is not a simple solution.

“My speculation is, in the situation that happened last April, that wouldn’t have made any difference,” he said. “Because of the manner in which that community existed and Greg’s not being real connected to that particular community, folks just didn’t notice that he wasn’t around.”

Lady said generally, students will be in communication with their friends, even if those people don’t live in Willkie, and it’s those students who will get in touch with Willkie staff before the staff even recognizes that there might be something wrong.

“The very nature of that building lends itself to the students needing to be much more forthcoming and responsible about what their needs are and what they want and what’s going on with them,” she said. “The staff have a responsibility to also keep a general eye on things — and they do that — but it’s a large community, and there’s always going to be those issues. They may seem, to the outside world, that they fell through the cracks, but that’s not necessarily how it all plays out.”