Elevators and bathrooms are available for students to use in every building on Cleveland State University’s campus. While these facilities are a second thought to most people, they are an important part of student life on campus. 

Conversations about wobbly elevators and the cleanliness of bathrooms have integrated their way into the lives of students that use them daily. 

These facilities on campus are used even though students are weary of them. Some elevators wobble on their way up or down and open slowly. Some students don’t feel safe using them. For others, it's just part of navigating campus.

“There's sometimes trash in the elevators or they just go down really slow,” Gini Claudio, a 19-year-old nursing major, said. “It jumps a little bit, but I'm used to it.”

Elevators on campus like these are also a source of anxiety for many students. The jumping and time it takes for elevator doors to adds to their worries, especially for students that already have a fear of elevators.

“I've already heard people say they have anxiety [towards elevators], but sometimes they're not gonna take the stairs,” Claudio said. “So they take the elevators, but it makes them more anxious.”

The bathrooms on campus can also be a source of stress for some students that worry about the spread of illnesses.

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^{The floor and walls in the MAGNET buidling's bathroom. Photo Credit: Lydia Kacala.}

“With all the illnesses going around, like monkeypox and COVID-19, when the bathrooms look like that (unclean), students aren't thinking they're in the cleanest of places, which brings an insecurity of ‘is this place clean?’” Haley Schaldach, an organizational leadership management major, said. 

This fear can cause students to change their routine or even miss out on valuable class time so they can use a facility that they have deemed safer than others, no matter how far it is from class.

“When I'm in my art class, I will walk seven minutes out of my way, just to go across the street, into another building and go up three floors of steps to use the bathroom because it's the only clean one,” Schaldach, 20, said. 

These facilities can affect the everyday lives of students on campus, either positively or negatively, and should not be ignored.

Campus Services needs to look into these problems around campus and resolve them. Whether that be through updating equipment or hiring more staff to cover the entirety of campus. The improvement of these facilities can create a safer environment for students, giving them peace of mind. 

The Stater reached out to Campus Services for comment on the concerns students raised, but did not receive a response.