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[3]By Dariya Baiguzhiyeva [4]
BELLEVILLE – Loyalist students now have a place for prayers.
Loyalist College [5] has provided a temporary room for those wanting to spend some time in prayers or worships. It is located in Kente Building [6], room 2H13. The room will be open every day, from 6 a.m. till 6 p.m.
Ann Drennan [7], Loyalist’s vice-president for academics, said it started with a student’s request for a prayer room.
“It’s not something we had looked up previously,” Drennan said. “So we were responding to a request we thought we should respond to.”
Drennan said that the request came in this January from an international student and the school was quick to respond. Because the room was opened this Tuesday, there’re still a lot of things that are needed to be done.
“We’re going to have to take more plans to look where would it be, what would be in it, how is it going to be operated,” Drennan said. “All those things we will have to respond to. We did it quite quickly, the room is not laid out in such a way. We just wanted to support a particular request.”
Drennan said that the room does not belong to a particular religion or a cultural group.
“I would be suggesting that we call it a multicultural room. I don’t believe it’s for one group or another.”
The room 2H13 will serve as a prayer room until the end of semester and by the fall, Drennan said she hopes to have everything formalized.
“We’ve been engaging students and staff on what’s the policy, reviewing what other colleges and universities do, so we do things that are appropriate,” Drennan said.
Loyalist will have to find a permanent place for prayers and provide all necessary accommodations. Once everything is settled and the school knows how the room should properly look like, it will be posting more information.
“We may will have to put up a schedule up outside which will be allocating times whenever you could use it,” Drennan said.