By Meliyah Venerable / Managing Editor 

Missouri Valley College is building new dorms for the coming school year. The plan is to start building this summer and be finished by Spring semester 2023, if the weather doesn’t affect construction too much. The new building will be right next to the Conway buildings across the street from campus. 

The campus has recently welcomed a new weight and training facility and is expecting a new nursing building in the coming semesters. Both new buildings were funded by donations, but these dorms are completely funded by the college and money the college has borrowed, President Bonnie Humphrey said. 

“We borrowed some and had some,” she said. “It wasn’t like the Fletcher building or the new nursing building. It was just something we needed. We needed to fund it, we had the ability to fund it, so we did.” 

One thing that makes these dorms different from the ones we have on campus is that they will be co-ed. Porter Brown is a coed dorm but is exclusive to the rodeo team, and Valley Village, and Viking Village apartments have men and women apartments but they aren’t housing both men and women under one roof. Along with it being co-ed, Heath Morgan says there most likely will be a requirement, similar to the requirements to live in the on-campus apartments.

“I imagine there will be some sort of requirement, but we don’t know what those will be yet,” he said. “We haven’t gotten that involved in it. We’re just trying to get the building done first. A lot of it is going to be needed, we have to maximize all of the buildings on campus.” 

According to the Chicago Tribune more than 60% of college housing is now co-ed, and it seems to be the most requested among the students. 

Building these dorms will really help the college. During the Fall 2021 semester, there were more students than housing, so the college had to send students to the local hotels and motels to live for the semester. So with new dorms and more housing, this problem can be avoided in the future semesters. 

Building more housing will give MVC the ability to renovate the residence halls already on campus. It will also give the opportunity to bring in more students.

“This gives us the ability to add students to our campus and relocate some from rooms that need to be renovated,” Humphrey said. “It’s hard to renovate several rooms in the summer. You have three months. This will allow us to move kids around some. This will allow us to have a wing of a building vacant so they can renovate, and it gives you space to grow.”