The Office of Residential Life recently adopted a plan that enables groups of four to six students to apply to move as a group, even when they do not share a single room, enabling friends from the same residence halls to stay together even when they move.

“Groups of friends get split up in housing selection,” Bonnie Prunty, director of residential life and judicial affairs, said. “By the time they pick, there’s not rooms next to each other or near each other or sometimes not even in the same building.”

Linda Koenig, assistant director of housing services and communication, who drafted the plan, said the changes came in response to a survey conducted last year, in which students said the college should do more to help maintain student communities.

“[The students] feel like we do a good job of supporting community development in a first-year setting, but then after that, it felt very individualistic,” Koenig said.

On Oct. 28, Koenig submitted the plan to Rory Rothman, vice president of student affairs, who said he would approve it if the students did. On Nov. 17, at the Residential Housing Association meeting, Koenig presented the plan for student feedback. The RHA members attending approved the proposal with no opposition.

Cole Lechleiter, a junior and president of the RHA, said as Ithaca College is a residential college, being able to maintain good resident communities is important for students living on campus.

“Students form groups pretty quickly, especially by even first semester,” he said. “You’ve got a pretty good group of friends, and you want to stick with them.”

Koenig said groups of students can fill out Block Housing Requests, specifying what kind of rooms they want and which areas of campus they would like to live in. The forms can be picked up in the Office of Residential Life starting Jan. 20, 2009, and are due Feb. 20.

Students will be assigned housing spaces based on their average priority numbers, behind squatting students and students who move off-campus, but ahead of all others.

Prunty said rising sophomores who lived in the first-year residence halls would benefit from block selection. She said a group of freshmen might bond with each other in the first-year residence halls but be forced to move out at the end of the year because they cannot squat first-year housing.

Koenig said while the plan would benefit sophomores most, it was intended for all students.

“What’s important is that students feel like they’re being supported and that there’s places in the housing selection process where they feel like they have an opportunity to develop their own communities,” she said.

According to Koenig, groups of two or three students could get a room together, and the system does not allow for larger groups so that it can avoid potentially having the majority of a floor move away and leave a few people behind. She said the plan was not necessary for apartments, as groups of four to six students could sign up for an apartment together once they qualified.

Lechleiter said when he was trying to select housing last year, he and his friends had difficulty getting rooms in residence halls on the quad that would allow them to live close to one another. He said being able to select housing as a group would have helped.

“It ended up working out, but there was a degree of uncertainty there, because we were ultimately trying to guess and check and see if the rooms would end up being close to each other,” Lechleiter said.

Koenig said rising sophomores were further hindered by being the last to select housing.

“Being the last group to go on to select housing really limits your options for housing, because they’ve been taken by our seniors and our juniors,” she said. “So, what you have left is what you have left, and that may not be three rooms next to each other.”