Due to a continuing housing crunch at Scripps, Pomona will once again host a few extra ladies from next door in the coming year.
The actual number of students in need of housing next year will be unclear until Scripps conducts its annual room draw. According to Staci Buchwald, the Associate Dean of Students and Residential Life at Scripps, her office will send an e-mail to all Scripps students in the next few weeks offering Pomona housing. Depending on the response, the number of rooms requested at Pomona could go up or down. Students will also have the choice to live off-campus or find housing accommodations of their own.
“The numbers aren’t positive yet, but there should be about 25 to 30 Scripps students living [on Pomona], about the same as this year,” Buchwald said.
According to Pomona Housing Director Deanna Bos, the college plans to house all Scripps students together on campus. Bos added that her office has not reached a decision regarding which building the students would live in.
“If the number [of Scripps students needing Pomona housing] is 75, that will be very different than 15, and we would have to think about it accordingly,” Bos said. “It will be better than it was this year though, because we will know before the fall and be able to house them all together instead of scattering them like we had to this year.”
ASPC North Campus Representative and Resident Hall Committee Co-Chair Caroline Rubin PO ‘12 explained that the decision of where to place the Scripps students will be largely decided by the Residence Hall Committee.
Although she admitted that a final decision had not been reached, Rubin said that the committee had discussed placing the students in Smiley residence hall on south campus.
“We felt that [Smiley] may have been the best place given that it is not on north campus, so it won’t take away dorms from juniors and seniors,” Rubin said. “And we will have an overflow of housing next year with the new dorms so there will still be options for sophomores to choose from.”
From the Scripps students’ perspective, Rubin added, Smiley seems like a logical choice.
“They can live together with their own RA in one place, which we thought would work best,” she said.
This spring, there are about 24 Scripps students living at Pomona. After more Scripps students decided to study abroad in the fall semester than in the spring, the Scripps administration began a search for off-campus housing in anticipation of their return. Pomona had extra rooms open due to the opposite abroad situation and a high number of students living off campus in places such as College Park.
According to Bos, helping out another college when a housing crisis strikes is not a new phenomenon at the 5Cs. Bos noted that since she began working at Pomona, the housing administrators have worked creatively and cohesively across the campuses to ensure that all students receive housing.
“We have a loosely-knit, informal yet helpful organization between the college’s counterparts and [we] try to help each other out,” Bos said. “Five years ago there were 13 [Pomona] students living at Scripps, and we’ve had a similar arrangement with CMC, but nothing to this scale.”
According to Scripps’s 2007 Strategic Plan, “the College will increase its student body to 1,000 within the decade.” This year, there are 946 students enrolled at Scripps, including students currently abroad.
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