If you’ve seen the large, cylindrical gray towers against Cheney’s skyline, then Eastern Washington University’s residential life is front and center: That’s Pearce Hall, one of six in-use dorms on the campus.
Pearce Hall’s unique design is advertised as a fun-fact about dorm life, oft a focal point during campus tours. Still, Pearce Hall showcases one part of an often-overlooked residential necessity: accessibility.
EWU’s campus hosts semi-consistent renovations, with the just-finished upgrade of the Interdisciplinary Science Center, the 2016 renovation of the Pence Union Building, and the revamping of Patterson Hall. The campus remains a mismatched, yet flowing center of new and old.
The renovated buildings have something the older buildings are missing: intentionality.
“They were built with these things installed rather than going back and retrofitting,” said Brock Sieb, the Director of the Student Accommodations and Support Services.
With the Americans With Disabilities Act having been federally passed in 1990, and insufficient state and local ordinances, the older buildings were retroactively fitted for accessibility rather than designed with potential student needs in mind.
For mobility-based accommodation needs, Anderson Hall is inaccessible; there are no elevators and the residential floors each require a flight of stairs to enter. The newest residential hall, Snyamncut, the only fully-accessible dorm on campus, was finished and opened in 2013, with a $1,000 higher price tag than the other residence halls.
To address this, students can register with the university accommodations office. This includes a one-on-one advising session with support staff to determine adequate accessibility needs and accommodations.
“Part of registering with our office is to remove that additional cost,” said Sieb. “Typically, if you are any general student who says ‘I would like to pay the difference for a single room,’ you pay a slightly higher rate, because you’re basically buying out someone else not being there. If that’s for a medical requirement, you are not charged for that.”
Accessibility comes in far more forms than mobility-based needs, such as wheelchair access, Sieb said.
“It might be that they need wheelchair access, but it might also be accessibility in terms of certain types of lighting,” Sieb said. “It could be needing automatic door openers because maybe they don’t have either use of their arms or their arm strength to open the door on their own, and so, it’s tough to quantify what specifically (they may need).”
Melanie Potts, EWU’s housing director, said via email correspondence that while she believes the university meets the needs of students with disabilities, she thinks it “would be great if we could provide a better diversity of options.”
“We do not typically get complaints from students, our students are so resilient and accepting of the conditions of our building and I think we do our best to accommodate them as best we can. However, just because we are not regularly receiving complaints that does not mean we do not believe we can improve,” she said in the email.
A Housing & Dining Survey sent by the Housing Department confirms that EWU is in the planning phases of updating the residence halls to meet the needs of their students.
“Housing is actively working to figure out how we can move forward with the building of new housing options,” said Potts.
