By BRYANT VENOSDELL, Student Reporter
The fall 2019 semester at Northwestern Oklahoma State University has officially begun. With the new semester, the NWOSU campus is getting a few updates.
While students were away this summer, NWOSU has took on projects to remodel buildings and a campus parking lot. Some of the projects are ongoing.
More than 300 windows in the Fine Arts building were replaced this summer thanks to an anonymous donor, who gave $1,000,000 to the university for the project. Some of the building’s bathrooms are also being updated.
“The windows were the first priority,” Dr. David Pecha, vice president for administration at NWOSU, said. “We are renovating all of the four bathrooms and doing a complete renovation of those, which has just started.”
After alloting funds for windows and bathrooms, the university had enough money left over to purchase custom blinds for the windows.
“We also had enough money to get vertical blinds for all the windows,” Pecha said. “The uniqueness of that building, though, is that not all windows are the same size, so we will have a company come in and manufacture the blinds specifically.”
Since the Fine Arts building is the oldest building on campus, the new windows are designed to look more modern and sleek than the older windows. Dr. James Bell, dean of the faculty at NWOSU, has an office in the buidling. He said he was pleased with the project’s outcome.
“The windows have about a quarter more window than how it looks from the outside from how far they go up,” Bell said. “It was a tough project as [workers] actually had to cut the windows to get them out. The windows are much more attractive. They have better insulation and much better noise reduction.”
Work on windows and bathrooms will be completed in the following months, according to university officials.
Another project taken on this summer will rebuild the parking lot south of the tennis courts.
“The parking and safety funds are funding that project,” Pecha said. “If it was raining really hard, we would have dirt wash onto the tennis courts, so we are just correcting all that and making it a permanent parking space.”
Ament Hall was updated as well. Steve Valencia, associate vice president for University Relations, was here for the summer and saw the updates.
“The window project in Fine Arts was the biggest one, of course,” Valencia said. “But there was refurbishing in the bathrooms of Ament Hall that was done before students got back to campus this summer.”
Pecha said that the NWOSU campus has a new look thanks to the projects.
“We just do the things that make the biggest impact for people, and we knew Fine Arts needed that,” Pecha said. “When people come back and they haven’t seen that building in two or three years, their mouths just drop.”
