By Brittany Burke and Rachael Bentley
Two weeks before Thanksgiving break, we walked into our bathroom on the fifth floor of Barrows dorm, and one of us was so surprised to see a soap dispenser and paper towel holder that she walked into a closed stall door, surprising the poor girl inside.
After a moment of shock and extreme embarrassment, it struck us that there was finally hygienic products in our bathroom.
Now, there are a few things you would expect as a first-year student living on campus: the cafeteria food to be less than pleasing, classes to be overwhelming, Thursday nights to be crazy and naturally assume that there will be hand soap, paper towels and a garbage can in your bathroom.
As two new Mildred Barrows residents, we moved in to our dorm rooms excited with the thought of what this next year held. You can’t really anticipate much from a dorm, other than four white walls, two or three beds, hopefully a window and some storage space. These seem to be the bare necessities of an average college dorm.
What would also be expected are soap and trash cans in the bathrooms. But for the past ten weeks we have had to supply our own soap and paper towels to make sure that we don’t get some sort of horrible sickness (i.e. Swine flu).
Recently, there has been a lot of hype on the issue of controlling and suppressing the spread of H1N1. CCSU has added hand sanitizer dispensers while littering us with pamphlets, flyers and free flu vaccines. This seems a little hypocritical, considering that they can’t provide all the dorms with soap.
If you look in the elevators of Barrows dorm, there are posters of how to protect yourself from infection. The number one habit that they stress is hand washing. But how can we do that if we don’t have any soap?
The regular dorm costs $2,500 – $3,000 a semester for students that live on campus. One has to wonder what on earth they are spending that money on when you have to pay for your own meal plan and there aren’t trashcans and soap in the bathrooms. Was our soap budget used to purchase unlimited automated sanitizers for the campus that are never full?
After a couple weeks of being told by our resident assistants that they were “pushing” to get soap installed, we decided to meander down to the other floors to see if they too did not have soap. To our shock and surprise, there were soap dispensers on the first floor and the penthouse (which is where guests usually visit).
For students who don’t know Barrows that well, the first floor consists of offices, which are used by Residence Life and other departments. It’s slightly insulting that the people getting paid to be in those offices get adequate supplies yet us students, who pay to live here, don’t get them. What is even more confusing is why we were the last dorm to get supplies when “up the hill” dorms stocked up weeks ago.
One of us even went to health services because of an illness and mentioned the issue. The nurse was shocked and appalled. She urged us to say something to whoever was in charge.
The Health Service office was jam-packed when we visited, and perhaps, if this problem had been handled much earlier, then the issue of swine and regular flu like symptoms would not be so prominent on the CCSU campus.
While we’re thankful for finally having soap put into the bathrooms, all we want to know is why did it take so long, and will you fill our empty paper towel dispensers as an early holiday gift for the residents of Barrows hall?
