The Drew facilities department is facing a slew of issues that need to be solved.
Most students and faculty on campus are familiar with the facilities department and, consequently, its problems. Though we have had nothing but good experiences with the facilities staff, we believe that the department as a whole needs to be improved so it can better assist the campus community.
Namely, the department needs to lower the time it takes to get things fixed, communicate better with other departments and students and try to mitigate the frequency that things need maintenance. Most importantly, university administration needs to take measures to help the department do these things.
Individuals within the facilities department are very helpful and important to our campus, but these overlying issues hint that there are large, organization-wide problems that they have to deal with.
One of the biggest problems of the facilities department is how long it takes for issues to be resolved. Many students and faculty complain that it takes days or weeks to solve a problem that affects their day-to-day living. For example, facilities only just responded to some work orders submitted by students during the first week of school.
Dee Cohen (‘26) has been dealing with maintenance issues in their dorm since the beginning of the year. They said, “The vents in my room don’t work and the vents in my roommate’s room blow constantly. The first time [we filed a report] they did nothing,” which meant they had to file a follow-up report this past week.
Luckily for Cohen, as they remarked, “[Facilities] did end up fixing [the vents,] but I have no clue what they actually did.”
Just a week prior, residents in Haselton Hall dealt with a near-constant alarm ringing for days after an exterior door stopped closing properly. The community advisors in the dorm and several students submitted work orders the day the issue started, but it still took the facilities department days to fix the door. Throughout the whole affair, no one knew when the problem would be resolved or what happened to the door that stopped it from working properly.
The lack of communication between the department and students makes many of the situations even more frustrating because none of us know what, if anything, is being done to resolve problems. Furthermore, once things are fixed, we are rarely informed of how to prevent the problem from happening again.
These issues also exist beyond dorm living. Last week, three automatic doors in important buildings on campus were broken, which negatively affected students and faculty with disabilities or injuries. The Office of Accessibility Resources had to submit multiple work orders, then had to wait days for the doors to be fixed, despite working automatic doors being an Americans with Disabilities Act requirement.
It is ridiculous that students have to wait so long for facilities to fix issues that affect their quality of life. It is also concerning that the department rarely shares what they are doing to fix problems that students are experiencing.
A large part of the communication problem is the website the department uses, which is outdated and hard to use. Even though Drew updated their entire website last year, there were no changes made to the work order page, which was already archaic.
Submitting a work order involves an overwhelming amount of steps, most of which are not intuitive at all. Furthermore, once a work order is submitted, there is no good way to follow up on the request without submitting more requests or contacting the department directly.
The current system feels like we send work order requests out into an abyss and have to hope that our problems get fixed in a timely manner, if at all.
In addition to this, there seems to be no way that the current system ranks the importance of requests. Many students have been told by faculty and community advisors that the best way to get an issue resolved is for lots of students to submit work orders about the same issue. This is, frankly, absurd. Just because the department gets more work orders about an issue does not make it more pressing than others.
It is also ridiculous to place the responsibility on students and faculty to submit work orders about the same issue, inadvertently clogging up the system. Instead, the department could be using a system that allows them to adequately judge which requests they need to respond to first.
There are also signs that there is very little interdepartmental communication regarding work orders.
Cohen recalled yet another issue, saying, “Our toilet was clogged on Friday. We submitted a report, but we didn’t know when they would come. So, we called facilities and they came in five minutes and fixed it. They even sent someone to clean up.”
Cohen told us that maintenance told her not to even bother filing a report, and to just give them a call. As it turns out, students with pressing emergencies such as clogged toilets should use the emergency line, as work orders are not processed on the weekends. Although this information is available on the website, it is not common knowledge among the student body.
Cohen continued, “Today, Monday, maintenance came to unclog the toilet and apparently they weren’t told that it was fixed.” Had there been proper communication in the department, maintenance might have been able to avoid making an unnecessary visit and could have taken that time to resolve other issues.
On top of all of this, so many issues students face are recurring or appear to be entirely preventable.
Students in McLendon resign themselves to dealing with elevator problems constantly, mold is in almost every residence hall and there are ventilation issues in lots of dorms (this list of problems is not comprehensive). This leads to a campus-wide question: do these persistent problems cause the department to be stretched too thin, and can the department not give the problems the attention they need because they have too much to do?
This all makes us wonder why the university does not invest in more employees for the department, so that they can at least attempt to complete preventative maintenance without interfering with completing projects as they arise.
Most students and faculty have a negative view of the facilities department because it is so fraught with problems, despite knowing that the individuals in the department are doing their best.
All of these issues are even more frustrating because they seem to signify deeper organizational disarray. A department that affects campus life so much should have a better, more transparent system in place. It is important that the university gives the facilities department the resources it needs to properly function, and that it works with employees and students to improve the current system. Without the administration giving proper support and sufficient funding to the department, the campus is doomed to fall into disrepair, despite everything facilities is doing.
Featured image courtesy of Allison Cannon.
