Smith College: Give Students a Moment to Move!

Put yourself in the shoes of a Smith College student for a moment. If you're most students, you're required to live in student housing. Less than 24 hours after you finish your last final exam, you are required to vacate your house entirely! Now imagine that:

- your neighbors are using storage services but as a low-income student, you can't afford them
- you pack up your stuff earlier, then have to live without it while doing really intense final exams
- the college's storage for the summer is all the way across campus and down a huge set of stairs (if you are on campus for part of the summer you can't use your house's trunk room)
- you're disabled and can't move your stuff that far
- there is no dolly service for students
- you're only given a one-hour window of time in which to move everything you own into storage
- you work in a lab and your experiment takes longer than you thought, causing you to miss your time
- you are only allowed five items in storage, making it nearly impossible to keep what little furniture you own (lamps? drawers? chair?)
- how on earth do you store things that don't fit in boxes?

This is the very real situation students face at Smith, especially when they intend to be at Smith for part of the summer and thus need to use the storage across campus. Our demands: Simple, straightforward and inexpensive reforms:

1) A dolly service available every day through an office that stays open.

There used to be such a service in the Campus Center, but it was dismantled when someone stole the dollies. This is a fixable problem! Require students to sign up and give their phone number/student ID, then charge them for any dollies that aren't returned.

2) Open JMG/trunk room storage times will be whole evenings, not one-hour blocks.

The current system is unfair because the student workers have to stay until everyone's stuff is in the room even if it's way over-time.

3) More JMG open hours in the summer, including Friday nights.

Currently students who have been on campus part of the summer and are leaving on the weekend have to store their belongings on a Thursday and then live in their room with their stuff gone. Consider that everyone has lamps because our rooms come with terrible lighting.

4) Two days to move out at the end of the semester!

NOBODY should have to move everything they own within 24 hours after a really difficult final. This is unhealthy. So is trying to live without your belongings while taking your finals. We should have at least two days to clear out of our houses, and the times should be announced early in the semester so we can plan our travel!

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