Elevators a necessity to some students

While most students relish the opportunity to miss class punishment-free, Brandon Friede isn’t one of them.

Friede, a junior, missed a lecture class in the Social Sciences building on March 11 because the elevator wasn’t working.  Though a convenience for many students, elevators are a necessity for Friede, who has a neuromuscular disorder that makes climbing stairs an extremely fatiguing endeavor.

“If the elevator isn’t working, I just can’t go to class,” Friede said.

Friede has had frustrating experiences with other elevators as well.  He missed his calculus class at least six times last semester due to the new elevator in the math building malfunctioning, he said.  He also had to postpone an exam by two days during the time the elevator was out of service.

Though his professors have been accommodating in letting Friede make up the work, he said missing the actual lectures had a negative effect on his grade.

“Missing a week of class before the exam really hurts,” Friede said.

Jim Marks, director of Disability Services for Students, said he receives complaints about the University of Montana elevators on a regular basis but that the complaints are usually routine maintenance.

“I think we do a pretty good job managing them, considering that elevators are mechanical devices and they go down a lot,” Marks said.

When a malfunctioning elevator is reported to Facilities Services, DSS is then immediately notified.  Marks said he receives about six of these calls per week, and the usual downtime length is about 15 minutes. Then Facilities Services and DSS try to assess how long the elevator will be offline to advise the affected students on what they should do.

If a student gets stuck on an elevator, Campus Safety responds immediately to evacuate the student.

Most elevator down times are for routine maintenance, not malfunctions, said Gene O’Neill, assistant director for maintenance at Facilities Services.  In order to best maintain the 67 “lifts,” which include passenger elevators, freight elevators and specialized wheelchair lifts, one hour of maintenance is required per level of a building per month.

For example, the Jesse dormitory has three elevators that service 12 floors.  That means that Jesse elevators require 36 hours of maintenance per month.

O’Neill said that Facilities Services tries to schedule routine maintenance around class changeovers and busy times on campus in order to inconvenience as few students as possible.

Jim Florin, program assistant for building maintenance, said this maintenance is necessary to keep the older elevators like the high-rise dorm elevators — which are 30 years old — working as efficiently as possible.

“A lot of our units are really pretty old, so they take a lot of maintenance,” Florin said.  “They also get a ton of usage.”

New elevators, on the other hand, take a while to work out the kinks, Florin said.  It took Facilities Services a couple of months to figure out that the source of the math elevator’s problems was a defective valve.  Since it was fixed at the end of November though, there have been no lingering problems.

The state also conducts a yearly inspection of all of the elevators every spring to make sure they meet state safety regulations.

Facilities Services contracts a company called Excel Elevators to maintain the elevators.  A maintenance representative is on campus eight hours a day and someone is on call 24 hours a day to respond to malfunctions.

The typical protocol for answering a call gives Excel a one-hour window to respond to the complaint and correct the problem if possible.  As soon as the situation is assessed, Excel calls Facilities Services, who then log the complaint and inform DSS.  Signs are also posted by the elevators if they are expected to be down for longer than 30 minutes.

“Once we’re aware of something, it immediately starts to turn,” O’Neill said.  “We don’t sit on anything.”

The problem, however, is that there is no effective way to inform students about the status of the elevators before they arrive on campus.

Marks said that there used to be a voicemail system in place in which Facility Services would leave a recording detailing which elevators were down and an estimated time when they would be running again, but Marks said that this was discontinued due to the unrealistic expectation that students would dial the number every day.

Barbara Seekins, the chair of the UM Americans with Disabilities Act Committee, recommends a buddy system for students with disabilities to have with another classmate so they can get notes if they miss a class due to an out-of-service elevator.  Students should also make attendance arrangements with their professors at the beginning of the semester so that professors are aware of potential problems before they occur.

Jon Pielaet, the president of the Alliance for Disability and Students of the University of Montana, said that though the elevators can be a pain, they generally aren’t a problem if students are proactive.

“We have much larger concerns, like buildings we can’t even get into,” Pielaet said.

According to the second provision of the Americans with Disabilities Act, which has applied to all public facilities since 1990, all individuals with disabilities are protected from discrimination in all services, programs and activities of government.

This means that every program UM offers must be accessible to the 998 current students with disabilities.

Seekins said that though the act doesn’t require that all buildings be accessible, if a specialized class is scheduled in a location without access, it must be moved.  This issue has come up most often with the upper-floor science labs in the Natural Science building, which doesn’t have an elevator.

According to Pielaet, other buildings with either poor or no access are Forestry, Fine Arts, Schreiber Gym, Jeannette Rankin and Main Hall. The Music building has an elevator, but it is for freight, not people.

If a student with a disability has a class in an inaccessible building, Marks said that DSS will contact the department and have the class moved.

Unfortunately, rooms with unique functions like Natural Sciences and the Music building cannot be changed. A frequent solution to the inaccessible labs is requiring students to take an online class instead, which doesn’t allow them to work with their peers.

“It’s legal, but it’s not good,” Marks said.

Because elevators are expensive, the ADA committee requests them on a “Long-Term Building Plan” list, which helps prioritize UM’s funding from the legislature. Currently topping the list are elevators for the Music and Fine Arts buildings.

For now, DSS and ADSUM will continue to work on making sure that attention to accessibility remains a top priority.  The new construction on campus poses some problems, like closed off sidewalks, but also leaves open the possibility for positive change, like rearranging handicapped parking spaces to be nearest the main entrances of buildings.

“Nothing happens unless students with disabilities stand up and demand it,” Marks said.