WKU’s Minton Hall reopens for fall semester after mold removal

BOWLING GREEN, Ky. – In November 2018, officials at Western Kentucky University made a startling discovery – mold growing throughout Minton Hall, a residence hall that primarily houses first-year honors students.

Following the discovery, those students – all 348 of them – were forced to move to different dormitories for the remainder of the 2018-2019 academic school year.

The school had initially planned on having renovations completed and mold removed prior to the beginning of the spring 2019 semester.

Due to the quality of air in the building remaining at unsafe levels, students were unable to move back into the hall.

It took nearly ten months of work and $750,000, but now Minton Hall is once again the place many new Hilltoppers call their home.

“We took out bulletin boards, we took out the base boards that were carpet,” said Mike Reagle, executive director for WKU housing and dining. “We changed out a lot of the ceiling tiles. We basically went head to toe back through that building one more time this summer to make sure we had gotten everything that could possibly be anything that mold could grow on.”

WKU doesn’t want to deal with a situation like this again, which is why the university is taking proactive measures to avoid a repeat incident at another residence hall in the future.

“We’ve bumped our preventative maintenance a lot,” Reagle added. “We’ve had to go back and do some corrective maintenance on things that needed to be upgraded – air handlers and things like that.”

Moving forward, one thing in particular officials will be closely monitoring is the air quality in Minton Hall.

“We’ve really looked at how do we balance our air quality in the buildings,” said Reagle. “There’s a lot of things that go into that with intake air and external air and all those kinds of things. Taking a close look at how we move air through the buildings and making sure we’re getting circulation in all those spots.”

Reagle said resident numbers in Minton Hall are back to around average this semester.

Residents from last year were given first option to move back to Minton for the 2019-2020 school year, but Reagle noted that most of those students chose to remain in their current residence halls.