Finding a place for displaced classes

Renee Houser, Director, classroom scheduling

Classroom scheduling is all about fitting together this enormous puzzle to fit together everyone’s needs to the best of our abilities. It’s a very challenging task, no matter what term is at hand. But the flood alone forced us to make more than 1,500 classroom updates all before the courses reached their final meeting locations for the first day of classes in fall 2008.

While we were doing all of the scheduling, we were again trying to assess the classroom needs to be sure that all of the seating was ordered in time. Our biggest concern was for the EPB [English-Philosophy Building] and the Adler Journalism Building so that those two particular locations were up and ready for fall. We had to be sure that all the classrooms were outfitted with markers and erasers as well as the furnishings for the instructor—tables, lecterns—and that all of the technology was in a workable form as well during the course of those few weeks.

So it was a very, very busy summer; I can’t remember one that was ever that chaotic. But at the same time we felt that that somewhat inspired us to keep going, every day, and when school started on Monday, the 24th of August, it was a good feeling.