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To:

American University Community

From:

Bronté Burleigh-Jones, Ph.D., CFO, Vice President, and Treasurer

Subject:

Fall Facilities Update

As we prepare for the fall semester, I want to inform you about a project to update key facilities and support our community. An important aspect of American University’s commitment to an inclusive campus is providing accessible restrooms for the AU community. This summer, we conducted a series of conversations among the university leadership, the facilities team, and key stakeholders about the university’s restroom inventory. Today I want to outline our action plan for improving these facilities. 

We currently have more than 130 all-gender restrooms on campus, including both single-stall and multi-stall restrooms. The single-stall facilities are individual restrooms while multi-stall facilities offer two or more stalls within each restroom location. Our review concluded that our restrooms do not currently provide a consistent level of privacy, so we will conduct a renovation project during this academic year which will feature several significant improvements that better serve the needs of our community. We will be adding nine (9) new single-stall, all-gender, ADA-accessible restrooms to increase the overall number of restrooms on campus. Additionally, we will enhance community awareness of our all-gender bathrooms, provide uniform language for our restroom signage, and create new maps of restroom locations.  

To successfully complete this project, we will build the new restrooms and modify existing restrooms in a select number of locations. We will change 14 multi-stall, all-gender restrooms to single-sex restrooms during the renovation and beyond to meet DC building code requirements. These restrooms are in Battelle-Tompkins, the Child Development Center, Hughes Hall, Leonard Hall, Letts Hall, Mary Graydon Center, McDowell Hall, and the Osborn Building. The construction of the nine new restrooms will ensure these locations have permanent single-stall, all-gender restrooms going forward. 

We know this change will have an impact on our LGBTQIA community, specifically our transgender and non-binary communities. We are working to put interim solutions in place during the project and will be convening a working group of campus stakeholders including the Center for Diversity and Inclusion and others to lessen the impact and minimize disruption. 

Our plan is to work quickly, thoughtfully, and diligently to complete this project as soon as possible. We have already begun the initial steps of the design work to identify potential locations in each building site for a single-stall restroom. The next step is to bring an architect on board to assist with further design work before we begin the permitting, bidding, and construction processes. All work is anticipated to be completed by July 2023. 

This investment will further our commitment to inclusivity and support our community. Any questions about this project can be sent to vpft@american.edu. Thank you for your support of AU’s values and our work to enhance our campus experience.