Campus Renewal: Student Life

Midland has a longstanding tradition of students cleaning and doing upkeep and maintenance of our campus facilities, including the bathrooms in Midland’s Upper and Lower Yards. As the decades have passed, students and faculty have worked together to patch, fix and occasionally update campus infrastructure so that daily and weekly maintenance remains a feasible part of our students’ work routines. Our focus on meeting the immediate needs of our facilities has led to a slow decline in the overall function, particularly in regards to our student bathroom facilities. In order to ensure that the next generations of Midland students can continue to take responsibility for the cleanliness of their restrooms, it has become imperative that we holistically update, and in some cases build anew, our student bathrooms.

After identifying the needed shift out of Sahm Canyon, our Campus Renewal team originally anticipated that we would simply relocate the majority of Upper Yard’s pan-abode cabins to new pads. After diving deeper into updated Santa Barbara County codes, we realized that the process of moving the pan-abode cabins would trigger requirements related to seismic safety that included drastic adjustments to each pan-abode cabin, including the loss of significant livable space and drastic impacts on the Midland aesthetic of each cabin. Because this process would also be costly, we looked instead at building new cabins in Midland’s rustic style and have plans to repurpose much of the pan-abodes beautiful cedar wood for other projects here on campus.