Bed Bug Threat Irks Dorm Life

A threat of bed bugs this summer prompted the Academy to remove and discard all student furniture kept in Dow Barn, PEA’s on-campus storage facility for financial aid students.Dean of Students Melissa Mischke called the situation “terribly unfortunate” and said that the decision to discard the furniture was not easy. She notified returning boarding students and parents about the furniture in Dow Barn in an email on June 17 and gave students the opportunity to request that their furniture be set aside for pick up on Friday, June 28.Following the incident, the school has strongly discouraged students from having upholstered furniture on campus for the 2013-14 school year.“As we continue to work to resolve this issue and with the safety and comfort of your student a primary concern,” Mischke wrote in an email sent to the PEA community. “Please note that in the coming school year no student will be permitted to bring upholstered furniture or items into the dormitories.”A second email, sent on August 17, amended this policy, and simply discouraged students from bringing upholstered furniture to campus.“We ask that you do not bring any upholstered furniture, including leather items, to campus this fall,” Mischke wrote.  “It is especially important that you do not bring upholstered furniture that has been purchased secondhand, or is of an unknown origin.”A change was also made in the E Book, with an added passage in the list of fire and safety regulations, on page 23. The rule states that “all types of upholstered furniture are discouraged...Any furniture that is in poor condition...is not allowed. Students are responsible for the removal and summer storage of all furniture items brought to campus.”While bed bugs are not dangerous to students’ health, they can be a severe annoyance. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, bed bugs are small parasitic insects that feed solely on the blood of sleeping animals and humans. They do not spread diseases and are not considered a medical or public health hazard. The most obvious sign of an infestation is bite marks on the body.Mischke said she kept student safety in mind when making the decision, as well as the idea of sustainability on campus.“In discouraging students from bringing upholstered furniture it is our goal to protect all dorms and students from bedbugs and a possible infestation,” Mischke said. “The situation in Dow Barn was terribly unfortunate for all. Given the trouble, that we had with the one dorm (a few rooms) last year, the school can not risk multiple bedbug problems in multiple dorms.”Facilities Management and Mischke plan on working with the student body and parents to find a reasonable and sustainable solution to upholstered furniture in the dormitories. They are making an effort to reconcile these issues and the desire to make one’s dorm room an inviting place to live.Mischke points to her own experiences with dorm living. “While I never went to boarding school, I remember the first large dorm room in college where I could bring my own touches; like a rug and couch,” Mischke said. “I was able to make the space more personal and less institutional.”Students in Wentworth Hall are familiar with the struggle of bed bug eradication. After evidence of bed bugs were found in nearby rooms, upper and Wentworth resident Wyatt Himmer suspected the hard-to-spot insects had gotten into his, as well.According to Himmer, he and everyone in Wentworth made an effort to keep their beds free of the pests by using “bed bug traps” under the bedposts and moving beds away from walls and other objects in the room.Erik Johnson of Absolute Pest Management was brought in to resolve the bed bug problem and explained last year that his company performed heat treatments by heating the rooms up to 145 degrees for 4 hours to “desiccate the bugs” and was optimistic about reducing the spread of the insects.“The school responded to the issue in my dorm by fumigating affected rooms and the adjacent ones,” Himmer said. “We also had dorm meetings addressing effective methods, which work, in theory, of preventing the spread of bedbugs. Unfortunately, as with most things, not everyone followed the guidelines, and so the overall effort kind of worked, but wasn’t completely successful. The bed bugs were only stopped after mass fumigation and, according to our dorm parents, a chemical cleansing of the dorm after everyone left for the summer.”Dorm head of Langdell Hall Alison Hobbie said that the bed bug problem “is an issue that plagues all residential schools.” She is following the deans’ lead on the issue.“The dean's office is not prohibiting upholstered furniture, so at this point I will simply discourage it as well,” Hobbie said. “I suggest if students wish to bring upholstered furniture they do their best to be sure it is new, or treated, before bringing it to campus. No one wants to be the one who has transported bed bugs into their dorm.”“I appreciate how thorough the school has handled ‘cleaning up’ any dorm that has been found to have bed bugs,” Hobbie added. “This is not an easy thing to do...these critters are pretty hard to get rid of once they settle in -- you must treat everything that is upholstered.”Jean Dunlavy, Amen Hall dorm faculty, hopes that the problem of Dow Barn will lead to more focus on bed bugs on campus.“I hope that this fall, administrators will provide updates and referrals to good, clear information for the whole community and follow up during the year, on the order of the communication and measure they took a few years ago when there was concern about a severe flu season,” Dunlavy said.Nevertheless, Himmer is skeptical that the school’s new policy, or any policy, would fully eradicate bed bugs.“Due to the fact that the school is not banning upholstered furniture, but instead, discouraging it, I believe that most will still bring their furniture anyway, and so the policy won’t have a huge impact,” he said. “Even if not a single student brought a piece of upholstered furniture, some dorms would still have bedbugs. Bed bugs survive quite easily, and thrive in places such as dormitories. I don’t believe there will ever be an easy, clear-cut solution to the bedbug problem.”