ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, August 25, 1996 TAG: 9608260024
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: BLACKSBURG
SOURCE: ELISSA MILENKY STAFF WRITER
The door to Micah Englund's room contained two important notices for the steady stream of parents moving their sons onto the sixth floor of Pritchard Hall at Virginia Tech Saturday:
* An optional bedtime "tuck-in" service is available, but will require "the dimensions of your son's sheets and a minimal donation to the 'send the R.A. [resident assistant] to college' fund."
* Milk and cookies are available for those late night "I-miss-my-mom sessions."
Englund, a resident assistant and Tech sophomore, thought he'd begin his stint as the hall's big brother/enforcer with a sense of humor. He prepared for his new role this summer as a counselor at a Boy Scout summer camp.
"This is about the same, but the kids are twice as old," he joked.
While Englund spent half his day lugging cardboard boxes out of the narrow hallway on the sixth floor, students and parents throughout campus carried televisions, computers and everything else needed for a year away at school to the small dormitory rooms.
Approximately 8,400 people will occupy Tech's 34 residence halls this year, including the on-campus fraternities and sororities, making it the 15th largest housing program in the country, said Ed Spencer, assistant vice president for student affairs.
For now, the Saturday before classes begin remains the busiest moving day. But that is slowly changing, according to Tech officials.
Until last year, students could move into the dorms only on Saturday and Sunday. Now they can begin moving in on Thursday, creating "controlled chaos of three or four days," said Tech Police Chief Mike Jones.
Students living off-campus have been arriving in Blacksburg all week in cars and rental trucks loaded with the necessities.
Still, parades of cars clogged U.S. 460 in Christiansburg, Main Street in Blacksburg and several other roadways in town by late Saturday morning. In preparation for the day ahead, the Virginia Department of Transportation launched a bright orange blimp with a camera attached Saturday morning in Blacksburg to observe traffic flow on campus.
Some of the most congested areas of Blacksburg, however, weren't the streets but the sidewalks in front of the dorms, which were crowded with cardboard boxes, piles of clothing, mini refrigerators and other belongings. Tractors, loaned by various university departments, helped weary students and parents with their loads.
Fifteen-year-old Stephen Slaby, who weathered an eight-hour drive from Pennsylvania on Friday, looked bored as he sat beside his older sister's belongings near Johnston Hall. At least this trip was better than the cross-country jaunt with the family to look at colleges last year, he said.
"I'm kind of happy," he said of his sister's departure. "I never see her anyway.... It's going to be like normal."
Anna Evans, who was helping her daughter Tamara, sat beside Slaby and guarded another pile. Evans and her husband, Bob, were dropping off their fourth - and final - child at school with a mixture of sadness, excitement and two car loads of stuff.
"I think we've gotten more exercise with this one," said Evans. "Every year, they seem to need more things."
This year, the big move-in week was complicated by a housing shortage on- and off-campus because of an enrollment increase. Graduate and undergraduate students still were coming to the university's off-campus housing office Friday and Saturday, but the problem is beginning to abate as they slowly find places to live in town.
The on-campus dormitory room shortage, which affected only male students, also is improving. The 82 students without dorm rooms temporarily have been placed with resident assistants or in study lounges that have been equipped with beds.
Spencer said the 70 extra students in the dorms last year were placed in regular rooms within a few weeks; he predicts similar circumstances this year. Rooms frequently open up at the beginning of the semester because of students who leave school for various reasons or never show up at all.
The students and parents who crowded the dorm hallways and rooms on Saturday mostly were oblivious to the housing problems, concentrating instead on the construction of wooden lofts, the decoration of walls and the arrangement of furniture.
Incoming freshman Ray Renfrow, who spent the morning helping a neighbor move in, had his mind on one other thing, and that was "having a social life because I went to an all-male boarding school!"
Renfrow's mother, Nancy, who was standing nearby, smiled and shook her head when she talked about her son's new life at a coed school. She's considering painting a banner on the wall near his room.
It would say, "Remember what you're here for."
LENGTH: Medium: 93 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: GENE DALTON Staff. A Virginia Tech tractor - and Techby CNBemployee - give Ruth Mitchell and her niece a ride to Mitchell's
son's dorm. 2. Delaware and Virginia Department of Transportation
officials launch a traffic-tracking blimp on the Tech campus
Saturday morning. color.