Residents of Residence Hall One are upset about the fire, health and safety inspections that occurred on Saturday, Oct. 1.
A student assistant performed the room check with a resident assistant between 11 p.m. and 1 a.m., raising students’ concerns over the time the room inspections were performed.
“There were no rules broken last week, in regard to the fire, health and safety inspections that happened. Staff are allowed to go into the rooms,” said Assistant Director of Residence Life and Housing Heather Kilsanin.
She said that the resident assistants are asked not to go into the rooms by themselves, and a majority of them chose another resident assistant to accompany them during the inspections.
“It is OK for the student assistants to be involved in that process as long as there is one RA,” Kilsanin said. “A staff member could include a student assistant. So I don’t believe there were any unauthorized people involved in the inspections.”
Students are given 24-hour notice prior to the inspections, Kilsanin said. Page 19 of the University Student Housing Guidebook states: “To ensure that the above guidelines are being followed, residents and University Housing staff will participate in fire, health, and safety inspections each semester with at least 24 hours notice to residents.”
For this specific inspection, Kilsanin said students were given at least a 48-hour notice.
“We’ve shared the dates [of the inspections] for the entire semester,” Kilsanin said.
The middle-of-the-night room inspections disrupted some students’ sleep before the Susan G. Komen race at Vinoy Park at around 5 a.m. on Saturday, several students said.
Jimmy Richards, a freshman finance major and RHO resident, believes communication about the room inspections could have been more efficient. Though signs were posted two days in advance, Richards did not know of the event.
“Email would be better,” he said.
“I would have rather been there, not that I was trying to hide anything,” Richards said, though he said he was not affected by the late-night room checks.
Travis Brewer, a freshman business major and RHO resident, was aware of the inspection date.
“I knew they were coming, just not at 12:30 at night,” Brewer said.
T.J. Ewin, Student Government attorney general, questions checking the rooms while residents are absent.
“I think they should leave a note saying they were there,” he said.
At USF Tampa, room inspections are performed once a semester and at the resident assistant’s discretion. The residents are given notification of a two-week window when inspections will occur, but “they don’t know when it will happen,” said Alex Belton of USF Tampa residence halls.
RHO has fire, safety and health inspections about once per month, Kilsanin said.
“As a resident, I am really upset, taken aback and offended. You expect you’ll be respected,” Ewin said.
His room was checked when he was not there. He feels the resident assistants are “doing the checks to catch the residents doing [bad] things,” he said. Ewin believes the time of the room checks was “completely inappropriate.”
As far as time of day inspection restrictions, Kilsanin said there is no specified time. “They can decide on a time together. There is no set policy on that,” Kilsanin said.
There is concern about whether the student assistant who performed the room inspection with the resident assistant was approved or not.
Brewer and Ewin filed a verbal complaint with Ashely Glenke, the graduate assistant in residence life and housing, on Oct. 3.
“All I know is that we talked to Ashley. She said she would relay it to Heather,” Brewer said.
He said nothing resulted from approaching Glenke. Brewer was not aware of the procedure to file a formal complaint.
As for the late-night room checks, “nothing unauthorized happened,” Kilsanin said. “There has been no official complaint made.”
She did not learn of the verbal complaint until the morning of Oct. 6.
“I could ask any resident how they would file an official complaint and they wouldn’t know,” Brewer said.
Kilsanin said the student is notified of what to do once the complaint has been brought to their attention verbally.
“They are told that when they come to us, the staff knows to let them know they need to send an email,” she said. “If I don’t have it in documentation, I don’t have it in writing, it’s hard for me to move forward with that.”
Photo illustration by Daniel Mutter
