Recontracting process a fiasco

Minutes after online housing recontracting began at 7 a.m. Tuesday, phone calls and e-mails from confused graduate students and upperclassmen were piling up in the housing office.

Rick Bradley, information and communications specialist for the Department of Housing and Residential Education, said complaints of login errors, double bookings and other complications continued as the morning progressed.

Bradley said officials shut down the system about 2:30 p.m. after realizing the extent of the situation. Following an assessment of the problems, they decided to postpone online recontracting until April 5.

The almost 250 applicants who successfully filled out an application Tuesday will need to repeat the process, Bradley said.

That might inconvenience students who were able to reserve an open room, but they had an unfair advantage because others could not log in, said Larry Hicks, director of the housing department.

“Everyone is back on a fair playing field,” he said.

Before heading off to an emergency meeting between the housing department and Information Technology Services, Bradley sent an e-mail to campus residents alerting them that open-campus recontracting would be closed until further notice.

He said three problems led to the decision to shut down and postpone online recontracting.

Login errors arose from a software glitch, causing Student Central to not recognize certain students as on-campus residents. This made students ineligible to fill out the application.

Rooms that were reserved through previous recontracting processes showed up as available and led students to double-book many rooms.

“There was apparently a bug in that program that caused those rooms already occupied to not be deducted from the master file,” Bradley said.

Men were not able to reserve rooms in Alderman, McIver, and Cobb residence halls because they had been coded in the system as women-only instead of coed.

Hicks said delaying the process by one week is the best course of action.

“It made a lot more logical sense to say let’s just stop now and pick up next week on the same timeline.”

Officials said they are confident that the problems will be resolved and that everything will run smoothly when the system reopens. ITS and housing officials said they will have ample time to resolve issues and run tests.

“Between now and Tuesday, we will be aggressively testing, not only for the problems we’ve had, but potential ones as well,” Bradley said.

He said setting the process back a week will not have an adverse effect on the overall housing process for next year.

While the housing department is glad that glitches were caught early and that everything should be resolved relatively easily, Bradley said he does not want to downplay what happened.

“We recognize that this was an inconvenience to students and apologize for that.”

Contact the University Editor at udesk@unc.edu.