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[5]By Rachel Bell [6]
BELLEVILLE – Loyalist College is having a harder time filling the space in its apartment style residences.
The numbers are better in January than they were in September, but there are still openings.
The college offers two styles of residences, apartment [7] and townhouses [8]. Chris Carson [9], residence manager at Loyalist explained the residences offer enough space for about 20% of the school population.
“We started off the school year at about 92% full, which equated to about thirty-eight students, which isn’t typical. Usually we’re full at the start of the school year,” he said.
Thirty-eight students is equivalent to between one or two floors in an apartment style building. The arrival of the January students however, brought the numbers up.
“The January intake this year was better than it has been in the past, which brought the numbers that we started off the school year with that were lower, back up,” said Carson.
It’s important the college fills the townhouses. Empty rooms don’t make money and, in fact, can cost money.
“They don’t always fill up, there’s an effort taken there,” said Carson.
“We have to market well, and gain some student interest. It is geared towards upper year students, and any advertisement we’ve done up to this point has been to the residence students. We’ll begin to market to all Loyalist College students that will be returning next year, and if we haven’t filled at that point we look at our first year mature students,” he said.
Carson said the school has made some adjustments to lessen the effects of not having all the apartments filled.
“We’ve been able to do some different things. With the openings we had at the beginning of the school year, we had empty apartments, so it allowed us to not have to dedicate utilities to those apartments,” he said.
Loyalist is also planning to make sure all residences are up to date, through renovations in the next couple of years.
“We have set some capital budget requests for next year. Nothing has been improved as of yet, but last year we were able to renovate bathrooms in Morton building, had ethernet drops put into D, E and McFarlane as well as upgrades on fire alarms and some boiler upgrades.”
Built in 1992, Morton, Riley and McFarlane buildings are the oldest residences on campus, making them a priority for upcoming renovations.