Upgrades to dorms underway at Livingstone College

SALISBURY, N.C. — There are efforts to improve Livingston College in Salisbury.

A student posted photos in January photos saying they found mold and cracked walls in the dorms at Goler Hall.

The school president said renovations were planned at that time.

“When students arrive to our campus, they will see many of the residents’ halls are getting a facelift,” said Dr. Anthony Davis, the college’s 13th president.

Davis has been on the job for eight months.

The early days of his tenure came with controversy last school year, which was sparked by students who complained on social media about mold in some of the school’s dorms.

“We spent a lot of money to confirm whether or not we had mold, and we had no pathogenic mold,” Davis said.

Davis hasn’t denied that parts of the campus have fallen into a state that may not be acceptable for some students.

“We provide more than $4.2 million, hear me, $4.2 million in need-based student aid and persistence grant,” Davis said. “What you do on one side of the general ledger impacts the other, so for us, it becomes infrastructure, capital improvements, and deferred maintenance.”

Davis invited Channel 9 to see what’s in store for some of the school’s housing.

“Right now, we have $8 million in campus refurbishments underway that will be completed at the end of this academic semester,” Davis said.

Freshmen male dorm Dancey Hall and female upperclassmen dorm Harris will both be renovated.

“What you see now is the work of our demolition crews,” Davis said. “They’ve come in and they’ve started to gut it.”

This is work that’s happening right as the school prepares to welcome a projected uptick in enrolled students.

“The predictive modeling says that we will have an enrollment, basically about where we were before the pandemic started,” he said.

The school says students will be displaced during renovations.

The college converted and upgraded 120 rooms of a hotel that Livingstone College owns on Jake Alexander Boulevard, which is where some students will stay.

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