Used dryer sheets, gray lint and lost socks are not uncommon sights when you use a laundry room on campus.
Laundry services were included in student’s tuition starting in the fall of the 2023-2024 school year, and since then, laundry has been a hot topic among the student body. From a laundry thief last year to questions of cleanliness now, laundry is on the mind of residents in the on-campus living experience.
The laundry rooms in residential halls are supposed to be cleaned daily during the working week by ABM industries, Trinity’s external cleaning provider. The laundry machines are cleaned by another provider twice a year and by request when a machine is out of order.
Due to the volume of students doing laundry every day, the rooms may not always look their best. Rachel Boaz Toppel, director of Residential Life, stated that rooms go through a cyclical pattern of cleanliness. In the cycle, they are cleaned, then students start to leave behind items and the mess accumulates until ABM comes back to reset the rooms.
Residential assistants and residential life coordinators inspect the residence halls regularly. The Residential Life leadership team also checks the state of the residential halls on occasion. Toppel noted that these inspections help the Residential Life team to create solutions to cleanliness in the laundry rooms.
“We are brainstorming right now. How do we increase resident education? It can’t all be on our residential life staff,” Toppel said. “It’s on the people who live in the space and use the space to help maintain the space.”
Residential Life is working with Trinity’s laundry machine servicer to clean the laundry machines more often. Toppel noted there are many people involved in maintaining laundry rooms.
“We are moving to work with the external company who maintains [the] actual laundry machines themselves,” Toppel said.
“We’re working to increase the rotation that they come out and actually clean the laundry machines. So I hope there will soon be a noticeable improvement to that cycle.”
Students use the laundry rooms daily, and some of the issues of untidiness can be attributed to student use. Jillian Tremble, sophomore human resource management major and Dick and Peggy Prassel Hall resident, stated that students have responsibilities to care for these shared spaces.
“It’s annoying when people don’t take the laundry out, or when you’re waiting for stuff, but that’s nothing wrong with what the university does,” Tremble said. “Overall, they’re kind of dirty, but we could keep them cleaner. You know, we live here.”
With a change from students paying for laundry to services being included in student tuition, the laundry rooms are used more frequently. Sabrina Cinque, junior biology major, noticed a change in tidiness with the on-campus laundry rooms over the years.
“I was really happy my sophomore year when they decided to not charge extra for laundry services,” Cinque said. “It wasn’t perfect my freshman year. But I think the quality and cleanliness, tidiness with the laundry rooms or laundry machines as a whole has gone down.”
Cinque has noticed gunk lining the rims of the machine doors, emitting a bad odor. When Cinque moved in, she noticed that cleaning in Camille Lightner Hall seemed incomplete.
“I remember my dad commenting on it because my family helped me move in. He was like … I don’t understand why it is already so dirty,” Cinque said.
Dirty laundry rooms aren’t an experience unique to Cinque. Her friends have expressed concerns over using the facilities because they are concerned about cleanliness.
“I know a lot of my friends who live in San Antonio, if they had cars, they would go home … because of the cleanliness,” Cinque said. “I think as a whole, hopefully, something can be done to [address] the matter and find a solution to make them more clean because I think that’s important and needs to be done.”
