On Wednesday Sept. 23, the
Student Life office closed the student
video game lounge adjacent
to the cafeteria. A sign in front of
the lounge said the closing was
due to “excessive noise/banging
into the offices below” and that
students should use the cafeteria
for “meetings and socializing.”
“The Student Services office is
located the floor below the
lounge. For the last couple of
weeks, we’ve been receiving
complaints from Student Services
about the noise,” Dave Colello of
Student Life said.
“We have respectfully asked
the students in the lounge to keep
the noise level down for the last
couple of weeks now. The noise
has continued and we were
forced to close it indefinitely. The
lounge is a place for people to
hangout and relax quietly with
the knowledge and respect that it
is school property,” said Colello.
But Larry Wayward, 21, a business
major who used the lounge,
wasn’t happy.
“Hey, if they’re taking away the
lounge. let’s grab some tables
and chairs and put it right here in
the hallway,” Wayward said.
“They’re telling us to go to the
cafeteria, but a cafeteria doesn’t
offer the same atmosphere as a
lounge.”
“The Fireside Lounge is under
construction. That has been taken
away, now this lounge. Fireside
should have been finished,”
Wayward added.
“We expect to have the Fireside
Lounge completed in a couple of
weeks,” Colello said when asked where students were to go.
For the next few weeks, where
will students go? “Well I guess
they would all come here to the
Gateway Atrium lobby,” said
Shannon Kelly, 24, a nursing
major.
“I don’t know where I would
go. I guess to the cafeteria where
everyone else is. I understand why
people are upset; I would walk by
the lounge and it would be pretty
noisy,” said John Kirsch, 18, a
business major.
Many students understand why
the lounge was closed. Many feel
that the closing is due to a poor location,
not so much the students.
“Closing the lounge is not a surprise
to me. I’m surprised it actually
took this long,” Carl Beck,
18, business major, said.
“There are offices below the
lounge and classrooms around it.
It was a bad place to have a
lounge. They should have found a
more suitable area. It was poor
planning on someone’s part and
now the students have to pay for
it,” said Ken Schmidt, 20, a general
education major.
Kyle Proctor, 20, undeclared
major, has strong feelings about
the closing. “If Fireside had been
completed by now this entire situation
would have been avoided.
It’s a shame, not everyone was
being loud, yet everyone is getting
punished for it,” Proctor said.
“Things will be loud, it’s college.
I find it funny, though, that
this is higher on the schools priority
list than enforcing those new
smoking regulations,” Proctor
said.
Student Services was asked to
comment on the complaints sent
to Student Life. However, Student
Services declined to comment
on the closing of the lounge
and suggested that any comments
on the closing be directed to Student
Life.