Housing Requirement

[Alpha1898]

Hello!

I am the alumnae president from a local sorority in Wisconsin. I am hoping to get some examples of your housing requirements and how you fill your chapter's houses? Do you have a "mandatory move in list" or a "lottery" on who is required/asked to live in the house each year? Thank you so much for any examples!!!

[KatieKate1244]

Our officers and sophomores are required to live in. This more or less fills the house most years. If we have empty beds after officers and sophomores we start with the juniors. We have a points systems so the junior with the most points gets asked to live in first. If she defers, the chapter goes down the list. Junior year is popular for study abroad and usually we can get people to live in for a semester. Then the next semester a junior coming back from abroad takes their place. Once in a while a senior will step up, especially if they don't want to sign a lease.

However you decide to fill your house, hold the members to keeping it full.

[FSUZeta]

Ours is very similar to KatieKate's.

[Sister Havana]

If you go to the Chapters dropdown menu on the Indiana University Panhellenic website, you can see the live-in requirements for each chapter on its individual page. (The website was recently revamped, and is a lot more informative now!)

[Theta1234]

At my daughter’s school, it is highly desired to live in the house. It’s a lottery to see who can get a spot. Technically, according to their by-laws, you can be required to live in the house the school year after your initiation. One of the other chapters at her school has this as well. It isn’t as desirable to live in their house. If there aren’t enough volunteers to live in the house, they start drawing names and those girls are required to live in unless they find a substitute.

Officers used to be required to live in. They recently changed that as Officer terms are Jan-Dec and housing contracts are Aug-July so it was always a bit of a trick for the officers to arrange other housing for their off semester. The President, House Manager and one other are still required to live in, but they have beautiful suites and private restrooms.

[navane]

I am on the house corporation board for one of our chapters. The beds are filled based on a priority order which includes required live-in by exec board members, house manager, etc. Then the order after that is priority is given to the members initiated the longest and by highest amount of merit points from the previous semester. If any beds are not filled, members are moved-in I believe in reverse order of precedence.

If any beds remain unfilled for whatever reason, then the chapter still has to pay the board for the empty beds. That happened about 3-4 years ago and the chapter had to cancel some social events due to needing the money to pay for empty beds. The next year they got themselves sorted out.

[SigmaCat]

Our system echoed some of the others already mentioned. The default policy was basically "everyone is required to live in" except new members with existing housing contracts (which was most of them) and rare case-by-case personal situations approved by the housing corp board with facilitating assistance from the Chapter Relations committee.

I think the only member who under all circumstances was absolutely required to live in was the chapter president, and she lived in a specific room. IIRC, it was strongly recommended that other executive board-level officers live in, but I don't think it was absolutely required.

Since we assigned rooms based on an earned point system, members with the most points had precedence when it came to room selection. If membership exceeded space available, those with lots of points could opt to live out so long as there were enough people "in line" behind them to fill the house.

Our points scheme was roughly geared to reward seniority in the chapter (points for every initiated semester), but you were also assigned points based on activity (committee chairs, event organizers, and officers all received points each semester based on the level of service corresponding to their positions) and GPA. You also got points for every semester you lived in, which was your reward for moving in ASAP. Every category of points accrued simply (eg, there was no extra point benefit to being a current officer, nor did you have to worry about losing a portion of your earned "officer" points once your term ended).

Also: we did room selection every semester. This was partly because we did officer elections for calendar rather than academic year terms and partly because it's common enough at our school for students to graduate in December. Some people ended up staying in the same rooms for the whole academic year or even beyond, but others switched it up every semester.

[flirt5721]

When my chapter had a live in house and they required certain exec members to live in the house (president, financial, house manager, new member orientation director). Also every member had to live in the house at least one.