Resident privacy vs. maintenance personnel

Manuella Mota/Contributing Writer

Until what point is your privacy as a student living in the residence halls in FIU affected by the way FIU housing facilities’ system of repair/maintenance works?

There is no doubt in affirming that the FIU housing facilities office is supportive in providing help for housing students, but the issue is when and how those maintenance services are happening.

The process behind requesting a repair in your room is quite simple. You are required to complete a work order request online, through the Housing Online Services (RMS), where you would describe the specific issue that needs to be fixed.

The FIU housing maintenance personnel completes requests from Monday through Friday between 9 AM and 5 PM and a request should be responded within 72 hours since the work order has been inputted.

Christian Spencer/FIUSM

The problem arises when students are notified that maintenance technicians are allowed to go inside the room even if nobody’s there, which may cause a problem with a roommate who was not expecting the worker or just create an invasion of privacy concern. This may seem invasive and even disrespectful to some students.

It is understandable that the workload for the FIU Housing Facilities (which manages several residence halls and apartment communities with over three thousand residents and provides a full-time job for over 25 mechanics and custodians) is considerably high, but a change in the system of repair/maintenance could be made, not affecting so much the employees and surely providing a more comfortable situation to students.

For instance, if when completing a work order students were able to choose specific dates/times within a block schedule (in intervals of 30 minutes in the morning and afternoon, for example), it is more likely for them, and roommates, to be prepared for the worker’s visit.

To make this work, the FIU Housing facilities office could schedule employees within those block schedules to only attend those specific appointment requests made by students, so they would have the time outside of the schedules to perform any other activity required of their job.

In this way, both employees and students would experience a better situation and neither would have to deal with an uncomfortable matter of invasion of privacy.

opinion@fiusm.com