By River Mitchell
@rivermitchell27
As the 2023-24 academic year is set in motion, some changes have been made to the campus, including a shift in first-year residence halls.
For this year, all first-year students were placed in Gulick, Reed and Lakeside Hall, leaving Massasoit Hall vacant outside of the counseling center. The move was made for a couple of reasons, as Director of Housing and Residence Life John Barnousky didn’t want to have a large number of vacancies in one given area.
“As a residential college, it’s important for us to keep that community feel,” Barnousky said. “Naturally, we consolidate students strategically so that there weren’t empty rooms in different pockets of places on the campus.”
Another reason that Barnousky wanted to have Massasoit Hall completely vacant of permanent residents was due to some deferred maintenance projects that the school is trying to do, which includes work on showers, carpets, painting and more.
“The opportunity to have it closed gives us some really good time to work on some of those projects,” Barnousky said. “Some of the deferred maintenance projects are very difficult to get done when there is a full building full of students.”
Even with the planned maintenance being done to different parts of Massasoit Hall, the counseling center still plans to move forward and offer all the same services as last year.
“We have not changed one bit,” said Brian Krylowicz, Director of the Counseling Center at Springfield College. “We are not doing anything different on any floor. Our world has not changed.”
The move also allowed the Counseling Center to continue offering robust services to the campus community.
“With a college this size, the amount of staff, you look, anybody regionally, we have a huge counseling center very devoted toward mental health, ” Krylowicz said. “The college is really devoted toward us.”
In terms of when residents can return to Massasoit Hall, that still needs to be determined, as the deferred maintenance is what is keeping it from being a first-year residence.
“Our goal would be to return it back to a first year area,” Barnousky says. “But some of the other projects might delay that return.”