WEST LIBERTY, W. Va. – With 1,944 undergraduate students at West Liberty University, some classrooms and facilities may struggle to comfortably accommodate a class’ capacity in a given semester.

According to U.S. News, there are 1,944 undergraduate students currently enrolled at West Liberty University. It can be difficult to accommodate schedules and classrooms depending on what major is being worked on.

A major problem with overcrowding in the classroom is the problem of furniture wearing down and needing replaced. Across the university, desks and chairs are beginning to fall apart and become damaged as a result of prolonged use. However, due to the prices of quality furniture being higher than it has ever been in the past, it has caused West Liberty University to begin relying on a work order system.

Joe Mills, the Director of the Physical Plant and Head of the Maintenance Department on campus, says that the process for work orders goes based on priority, meaning that work orders are sorted based on how important they are to address.

I talked to some of the professors that work in Main Hall regarding some of these issues I mentioned. One of the main things the professors insisted on is that despite the chairs and desks needing repairs, student capacities are not a major issue. The student capacities are determined by the Fire Marshalls for safety reasons.

I visited the classroom where one of the professors I spoke with, Doctor Gayle Jesse, teaches. Room 209 is a computer lab, where the computers are located inside the desks with keyboards attached and have plastic shields to help protect students’ eyes. Despite the room looking clean when first walking in, more signs of wear and tear could be seen upon closer inspection.

Not only do multiple chairs in the room lack the ability to raise and lower, but one of the computer monitors in the room currently is unusable and the white boards in the room have markings that are irreversible, be it from excessive use or from accidental bumpings. One of the desks that has its side facing into the center aisle between the three rows of desks has its paint peeling off.

Another problem that was present in the room was the technology itself, specifically for the projector. The method currently in use is

very dated, requiring converters from composite to HDMI (High Definition Multimedia Interface). Due to the age of the projector being much newer than the computer and its plugins, being installed into the room sometime around the Fall 2024 semester, the video feed would glitch out at least once per class, lasting only a few short seconds. This problem is not exclusive to the Business offices, as West Liberty’s Broadcasting department has been working with outdated hardware for a long time.

As previously mentioned, the Fire Martial is responsible for labelling how many students are allowed into a room at a maximum. Despite the number of students allowed into Room 209 at a time being 47, there are currently only a maximum of 36 computers available, meaning extra students who sign up are required to use their own personal computers to complete work.

For a computer lab, that is fine, but in Room 400 of the Fine Arts Building, the student capacity is 40, with only 24 being in the room, including the broken chairs still in the room. While there are currently talks of potentially getting new chairs over this holiday break, no plans have been made at this time. 

Despite the issues, the Business department does not seem too concerned with the issues because of the campus’s tight budget in place. Like all departments, the Business department is given a budget for each semester to address any issues that arise. The money that is not used for the current semester is used for future planning.

The campus’s maintenance team is responsible for keeping up with all of the buildings on the grounds of West Liberty University. Some of the skills a maintenance team member needs to know is working with electrical and plumbing equipment, construction planning and general knowledge of hardware usage.

One of the problems Mills talked about in our interview was how there was a lack of workers on the team, making it difficult to meet the number of work orders that come through their offices on a daily basis. The team has put a major priority on the residence halls first and foremost, since that is where a majority of the work orders come from.

The maintenance team has also begun taking more action with campus “projects,” described by Joe as work that changes the appearance of rooms. An example of that would be the renovation project still going on in Main Hall next to where the Student Government Association just moved to.

One of the more important factors is the cost of executing the work orders. As mentioned earlier, the cost of supplies and furniture has risen considerably in the past few years. Mills claims that even though the maintenance department does try and fix as much as they can without disposing the furniture, the problem is that damages are too costly to fix due to the tight money supplied by the campus. 

For context, West Liberty University has split their funding for their different departments accordingly to try and help keep the campus up to state codes. Money is split between different campus facilities, such as the Housing Department and Campus Maintenance, to help make sure facilities of all buildings are up to the standards needed, which is more difficult because of the age of some buildings on the campus being older than 100 years.

Another problem is the student enrollment numbers being lower than they have been in the past. This is important because the budget for the college is directly based on the students enrolled for the semester. While I was not given an exact number, what is known is that there is a finite amount of money that is split down to the different departments, including the maintenance. 

As more and more students begin returning to campuses across the country following the COVID-19 pandemic, West Liberty is one of many universities that is beginning to feel the pressure of accommodating larger class sizes again. But without the proper seating and adequate supplies needed, it can be hard to keep students enrolled with such a high demand for specific needs for students of all majors and degrees.