Meetings ease tension between students and neighbors
Christina Santucci
Issue date: 9/21/04 Section: News
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The meetings, held at Aquinas, McCauley and Ahern, the Villages of Homeland, Gallagher Park and most-recently Belvedere Court (including students living on Nickel Avenue) are varied in setup and content.
"Our main goal is to allow students living off campus to meet and greet their neighbors in a structured setting," said Scott Eckhardt, assistant director of Student Life. "The college just facilitates that meeting."
While the Belvedere Court meeting took place in someone's home, the gathering at Aquinas is traditionally more informal, with several neighbors bringing their children along to play.
"For me, Aquinas is a huge success story," said Vice President of Administration Terry Sawyer about babysitting networks and message boards which allow neighbors and students to communicate at Aquinas.
The McCauley and Ahern meeting, slated for Thursday, Sept. 23, will serve more as a meet and greet for the students and locals.
In Gallagher Park, students, who occupy the majority of the residences, were warned of local police who have frequented the area in the past, checking for mainly liquor law violations, said Eckhardt.
At the Homeland meeting, held on Sept. 16, both neighbors and students voiced concerns over respect.
The Villages of Homeland, the area with the highest concentration of Loyola students in one off-campus area, provided for a round-table discussion between the students and their neighbors along with four college administrators.
Homeland resident Alan Barysh recommended that the community have more discussions throughout the year to ease tensions.
"Any meetings going on with the community and members of the college can only help the situation," said Ashley Bertrand, the SGA director of Community Relations. "If we don't have any communication with the community, then obviously no relationships can be formed."
Bertrand said she will be meeting with students living off-campus to discuss and gauge their issues with their housing and neighbors.
So far, "I haven't heard anything to lead me to think that [this year's relationship between students and neighbors] is anything but good and promising," said Ann Walsh, the president of the North Baltimore Neighborhood Coalition (NBNC).
"If everyone lives up to their end of the bargain, it think it can be a good relationship. I think that Loyola is a model that hopefully other colleges and universities can emulate. That is always premised, however, on the community and the students and the college living up to their expectations."
The current agreement with the NBNC includes a cap on student enrollment, specifications on the properties that Loyola can buy and own, an agreement to have to trash picked up between the hours of 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. and regulations for students on parking in the neighborhood.
"Many of the things [the NBNC is] requesting are quite frankly pretty fair," said Sawyer, adding that some of the time students are living within a close proximity to young children and elderly residents.
Eckhardt also said that local residents are much more likely to call on the college's campus police because of the quicker response time than Baltimore police when they have a problem with students' behavior.
"But what we want to avoid is the finger wagging: don't do this; don't do that," he said.
Both Sawyer and Eckhardt advised students to develop relationships with their neighbors so that issues can be easily worked out.
"If [neighbors] have some forewarning, they are much more likely to not take the drastic step of calling campus police," said Sawyer.
If campus police find the complaint to be unfounded, no action will be taken against the students, said Eckhardt.
Still, some students residing off-campus question the amount of involvement of campus police in their neighborhoods.
"Sometimes at night campus police circle around Gallagher like they're looking for someone doing something wrong," said senior Claire Najour, a resident of Gallagher Park.