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Volume 56, Issue 18 | MONDAY, OCTOBER 4, 2021 | ndsmcobserver.com
Gateway cohort reacts to housing update Students respond to unprecedented lack of on-campus housing for 2022-23 academic year By LIAM PRICE News Writer
On Friday morning, Notre Dame’s office of residential life informed students in the 2021-2022 cohort of the Holy Cross Gateway Program that housing will be unavailable for them and all other transfers for the 2022-2023 academic year. Each year, the College hosts around 75 first-year students as part of the Gateway Program. As long as they maintain a 3.5 GPA in their first year at Holy Cross, the students transfer to Notre Dame at the start of their sophomore year. Though Gateway students had
been offered housing in past years, this year’s students will be the first to be fully denied housing in the nine years of the program. This decision comes after a spike in yield rates — the percent of accepted students who choose to enroll after being accepted — for Notre Dame’s class of 2025. “Increased yields in first year student enrollment over the past several years effectively eliminate this possibility for Fall 2022,” the office’s email said. The year’s yield rate, 58%, was Notre Dame’s secondlargest ever, according to senior vice president for enrollment Don Bishop. Further, the email encouraged
students to begin the search for offcampus housing immediately. In an email to The Observer on Sunday, University spokesperson Dennis Brown said the announcement was made early to give students adequate time to make other arrangements. “The letter was sent last week in order to give students as much time as possible to make off-campus housing arrangements,” Brown wrote. Gateway students, after being offered admission to the program in their application portal, are told that housing is not guaranteed for them when they transfer to Notre Dame. However, many Gateway
students, like Claudia O’Sullivan, did not anticipate housing to be an issue. “In the spring when they were telling us about the whole housing situation, it seemed much more guaranteed than I think it actually was,” O’Sullivan said. “It would’ve changed a lot of people’s decisions, and it’s a pretty big decision.” But despite her disappointment, O’Sullivan is still holding out hope. Also a member of Gateway’s ninth cohort, Daniel Schrage was upset about the lack of transparency on the issue from the administration. “I felt like they kind of backstabbed us because they told us
we had the chance to live on ND’s campus for three years, then they just took that out from under us,” he said. Ryan Miklus said he thinks this outcome was the product of Notre Dame’s own miscalculations. Madeline Murphy said she was upset that the University’s threeyear on-campus requirement exacerbates the shortages of housing space on campus. Dr. Kate Pastore, a parent of Gateway student Grace Kayastha, echoed Murphy’s sentiments. “My daughter and her classmates
see GATEWAY PAGE 3
Protests near South Bend debates police campus highlight officers in schools climate change
By ISA SHEIKH News Writer
At the Sept. 20 meeting of the South Bend Community Schools Corporation (SBCSC), the school board discussed a drive-in movie at Washington High School, districtwide professional learning and a dual language immersion grant. Not on the agenda, however — the presence of armed police officers in South Bend schools, also known as school resource officers (SROs). Because of a 2012 contract between the St. Joseph County Police and South Bend Police Department, there are four officers in South Bend schools. The district annually spends approximately half a million dollars on that contract, advocates say. The police allege differently, saying in a press release that the “average split-reimbursement for our SRO’s has been between $290,000-$330,000 when we had six SROs in the schools, we now have only four,” and that SBSC only pays half. Advocates and community members who had assembled to speak on that issue got their chance to talk an hour and five minutes in, when the Board heard comments from the public on items that weren’t on the agenda.
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“It was definitely a little tense,” Noemi Toroczkai said. “But it was tense for a good reason.” Toroczkai, a Fulbright Scholar from Granger currently working as a Fulbright application advisor at Notre Dame, was there along with groups such as the South Bend NAACP, the South Bend chapter of Black Lives Matter and the Michiana Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression. As an anthropology student at the University, Toroczkai grew interested in the racial problems in South Bend schools, hearing anecdotes and experiences in the 2020 summer protests following the police killing of George Floyd. For advocates seeking to have the SBSC discontinue their contract with the police departments, the issue of armed officers in schools is just the tip of the iceberg, according to Indiana University South Bend (IUSB) labor studies professor Paul Mishler. Mishler, whose department at IUSB is a sister department to the Higgins Labor Program at Notre Dame, has been an activist since the Vietnam War era. He helped organize the coordinated presence at the school board meeting, and subsequent protests on the issue. To Mishler, police presence has problems outside of just school
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campuses. “Part of the experience of black people in America is the police as an occupying force in their communities,” he said. Advocates like Mishler argue that SROs came into existence in places such as South Bend following desegregation efforts, as white families grew uncomfortable and advocated for armed presences on campus. During the meeting, of the public commenters who came to the podium to offer thoughts on SROs, only one woman was speaking in favor of them, arguing that SROs keep the community safe. Mishler and Toroczkai argue that SROs don’t make schools safer, but the presence of an armed police officer does the exact opposite. But police officers argue they have been in schools for decades, building connections and interacting with South Bend students in a positive way. “It takes a special person to interact with kids,” St. Joseph County Sheriff William Redmond told the South Bend Tribune. “I’m not just going to put someone in schools who’s aggressive, who’s just going to arrest everybody. I want our officers to engage with see POLICE PAGE 4
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CLAIRE LYONS | The Observer
Jackson Glynn and other Notre Dame students line up along Angela Blvd. to advocate for action against climate change. By MAGGIE EASTLAND Associate News Writer
Around 30 Notre Dame students, professors and members of the South Bend community gathered at the corner of Angela Blvd. and Eddy St. on Friday to advocate for environmental policies in the fight against climate change. “We’re trying to light a little fire here in our corner of the world,” sociology professor and organizer Christian Smith said. The protest took place as
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Democrats in Washington D.C. try to pass extensive climate legislation along with various social safety net programs in the Build Back Better bill. Smith said widespread policy to fight climate change, such as a tax on carbon emissions and efforts to stop cutting and burning the Amazon rainforest, must come together as soon as possible to avoid climate disaster. Protestors carried neon posters with various see CLIMATE PAGE 3
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