Residence Services rejects laundry proposal
Sophomore fashion design major Anna McCann loads a laundry machine in Centennial Court E on Wednesday. She is pleased that students will have to pay a $40 laundry fee per semester instead of having laundry cards. “That would be so nice because I know I have spent way over 40 bucks,” McCann said. Photo by Jessica Yanesh.
February 11, 2011
Residence Services has turned down a proposal from Kent Interhall Council
that would have placed a $40 flat rate on laundry services.
The $40 rate would have been added to students’ room and board and allowed students unlimited access to the laundry facilities in the residence halls.
Mandy Lautzenheiser, a junior French major, said she would have liked to see the proposal pass because she does the majority of her laundry on campus.
“I like the idea because I have to leave my building to put money on my card and sometimes I forget, so this just eliminates this issue of making sure I have money on my card,” Lautzenheiser said.
KIC President Andrew Weber said the proposal received 70 percent of support from residence hall students who filled out the EBI survey in the fall, and it was passed through the KIC.
“A lot of things were said that I honestly wasn’t really sure if it was going to pass,” Weber said. “Once it was passed last week, it was basically us as a student body saying to Residence Services, ‘We are in full support of this.’”
Betsy Joseph, director of Residence Services, said although the proposal was met with overwhelming support from the residence hall students who responded to the EBI survey, she couldn’t vote to implement the proposal knowing that many students live in close enough proximity to campus to do their laundry at home.
“With a likely increase in tuition, a likely reduction in some type of grants that are available to new freshmen who are going to be coming to campus, I was concerned to implement an across-the-board rate,” Joseph said.
Although Residence Services rejected the proposal, Joseph said she is working with KIC Campus Laundry Solutions, who services Kent State’s laundry facilities, to come up with solutions to better the laundry program. Some of their ideas include adding an online option for putting money on cards, increasing the number of cash machines and programming the machines to accept $1 bills.
“Things cost, and so trying to weigh that in a way that’s not going to negatively impact students who are using our laundry facilities — we’ll have to take into consideration as we review those issues,” Joseph said.
Contact Leighann McGivern at [email protected] .
