Housing and Dining is going through some changes that could benefit students living in the residence halls.

Housing and Dining is putting a greater emphasis on working one-on-one with students for the Fall 2010 semester, said Housing and Dining executive director Michael Stang.

“One of the things we’re going to try to do across the campus this year is to make sure students don’t fall through the cracks,” Stang said. “For this year, we have added more student staff in order to help talk to students and connect them to resources.”

On floors where there is a high resident-to-community-adviser ratio, Housing and Dining has added a second CA.

Community Adviser Sara Rowe works in Neptune West, one of the residence halls where a second CA was added. Rowe said she thinks it has helped to build the community during the first few days of the semester.

“It has helped me to get to know the residents a little better,” Rowe said. “We ran the floor meeting together and just walked around and met the residents.”

Housing and Dining has also instituted a new procedure for dealing with problems of bias or discrimination in the residence halls.

While they were able to investigate the problems before, the new policy is designed to help restore the community after the incidents, Stang said.

“We will have a team that will work with the community to try to engage them in some conversations and try to bring some resolutions to those situations,” he said.

Sophomore history major Thomas Fowell lived in a residence hall on a floor that had bias issues last year. Fowell said nothing was done to help the other people after the incident, and that he felt like the new policy would help.

“To have an unbiased group that is an outside source to get involved will make things better,” he said. “To have people talk to us and explain what happened and what was done about it would give closure.”