You might want to think twice about stacking your bed on cinderblocks.
Starting next fall, a new residence hall policy will restrict students from stacking their beds on anything.
Photographs from the residence hall custodial and maintenance staff show beds in dangerous positions: duct-taped to the top of desks, attached to poles with Erector Sets and stacked on stilts and cinderblocks.
“We looked over that and decided that we just couldn’t be allowing that,” said Stan Olin, director of Housing & Residential Life. “It’s inappropriate, it’s unsafe; it’s a health and safety concern. That’s what we’re responsible for. We needed to take some action.”
Resident Assistant Wendy Lakin said that, when taken to an extreme, stacking the beds on cinderblocks is dangerous.
“I’ve seen people who have stacked two to three cinderblocks height-wise on top of each other,” said Lakin, “and I think that that could be a problem.” Lakin has also seen metal poles inserted into the legs of the bed, which she said “isn’t very safe either.”
Zachary Talbert, a freshman living in Parkside Commons, said he thinks the new bed policy is unfair.
“All I know is that [a bed on cinderblocks is] completely sturdy,” Talbert said. “You can go up there and start shaking the bed. It won’t do anything.”
Lakin said she doesn’t know of any injuries from the raised beds.
“Although a concern is that…if there were a fire or an emergency where you needed to get out, it would delay people getting out of bed, or cause injuries,” Lakin said.
The policy will come into effect next fall, but returning residents were notified of this change in the latest residence hall meetings.
“We put out some information to the returning students when they signed up for next year, [telling them that] we’re going to have a new policy…just so we wouldn’t catch anyone by surprise,” Olin said.
Next semester, the maintenance staff will also put wooden loft beds in 48 of the residence hall rooms “as a pilot test,” Olin said. These beds will be elevated over the floor. The students and the custodial and maintenance staff will evaluate the safety and comfort of the loft beds.
To be fair to returning students, Olin decided not to put the policy into effect until next fall. “Again, I didn’t want to do it in the middle of the year,” Olin said, “because that didn’t seem appropriate to students who live here.”
