"Everyone Here is Working Constantly": Facilities Team Keeps WWC Running
Clara Shirley and Ryleigh Johnson | October 28, 2025
Warren Wilson College (WWC) students look for supplies at the college’s facilities building in Swannanoa, N.C.. (WWC/The Echo)
Situated across from the Warren Wilson College (WWC) farm stands the facilities building, home to the handful of crews that keep essential operations on campus running. These crews share a large amount of responsibility for the appearance and functionality of WWC, but have been met with a persistent lack of resources leading to overworked staff, delayed repairs and general inefficiency.
“Facilities has a lot of different crews,” Taylor Smith, the director of WWC’s motorpool and manager of the work order system, said. “It kind of just does the general maintenance of the entire campus.”
Maintenance Services Crew tackles repairs, event setup, plumbing and lightbulb replacement. Construction Crew undertakes both minor repairs to dorm rooms and roofing projects. Paint Crew, which handles interior and exterior paint projects along with graffiti removal. Carpentry Crew’s supervisor Andy Denison manages furniture repairs, gutter cleaning and vehicle maintenance. The newly created HVAC Crew is responsible for maintaining all of the HVAC systems on campus.
Smith, who graduated from WWC in the spring of 2025, was hired in a full-time role to help streamline the system for processing “work orders,” the broad term used to describe all maintenance requests submitted to facilities. While her guidance has helped the system work more smoothly, facilities crews still face challenges that can make their work difficult and extend wait times for repairs.
“During crew meeting, we have, like, 80 people down here,” Smith said. “We don't have enough vehicles to transport all those people halfway across campus to the rentals or [the] Villages [dormitories]...By the time they get [to their work sites], it's time to come back. We have all these people that are ready to work, and it's awesome, but we don't really have a way to utilize them.”
Smith also explained that this lack of sufficient resources extends to staff as well, with too few supervisors for the number of people they are expected to manage.
“We have a lot of students right now on our crews,” Smith said. “Dave [Marshall, Paint Crew supervisor] has 25 students. I think Doug [Bradley, Construction Crew supervisor], Johnny [Scott, Maintenance Services supervisor] and Andy [Denison] all have between 15 and 20 students...We just need more staff to manage more students, because these guys have as many students as they can handle.”
This mismatch in the number of supervisors to students leads to inefficiency, with some student work only allowed to be completed in the presence of a trained supervisor and supervisors also expected to manage outside contractors alongside their crews. Still, students like junior Maintenance Services crew member Rachel Gaskins emphasize the amount of support and care they are shown from their supervisors, even while they are pulled in many different directions.
“Our crew supervisors are really cool people, really cool bosses,” Gaskins said. “I feel like I can rely on Johnny [Scott] for a lot of things. I can ask him endless questions and he won't get irritated with me.”
Gaskins is grateful for the skills that working on Maintenance Services has given her over her past five semesters, learning how to patch walls, replace commercial lightbulbs and do plumbing.
“The most useful skill I've learned on this crew is problem solving, even when you aren't sure what the problem is or how to fix it,” Gaskins said.
Unfortunately, Gaskins has noticed that supervisors do not seem to receive the same support from the institution that they provide to students.
“[Supervisors are] swamped,” Gaskins said. “They're balancing hundreds of work orders at a time and teaching students how to do the work, while at the same time having to do the work themselves. It's a big commitment. It’s a little disheartening, because I can see them pouring so much of our heart and soul into this, and they're not, in my opinion, getting paid enough for it.”
This lack of resources was worsened by the recent utilization of facilities supervisors to help temporarily fill roles in WWC’s Public Safety office. The office was hit by what Director of Public Safety Ian Smith called “a perfect storm” of retirements and departures, resulting in four of the six full-time staff members leaving. Among those who left were Chris Gillespie, director of public safety and risk management, and Paul Puglisi, lead public safety officer.
“We've had some public safety folks step up and work a lot of extra hours, plus folks from facilities management helping out...” Smith said. “We have some really amazing, wonderful people who just stepped up to help out, realizing how important it is to our campus and the safety of our students.”
Smith believed that facilities staff members would be good candidates to act as temporary public safety officer replacements because of their pre-existing access to buildings on campus and their institutional knowledge. Some facilities supervisors, though, are feeling the strain of working an extra role on campus on top of their full-time positions.
Kevin Hudson, supervisor of the HVAC Crew, was one of the Facilities supervisors asked to work additional public safety shifts.
“We didn't get an option,” Hudson said. “We were ‘volun-told’, [those were] the exact words used. I'll put it this way: if we refused to do it, we got written up.”
Hudson emphasized that he felt it was unfair for facilities employees to be the only staff on campus asked to work public safety shifts, when departments like Housing & Residence Life also have full-time employees who would have the knowledge and access needed to help out.
“[Housing & Residence Life] also...know the buildings and they know how operations work,” Hudson said. “I feel like there's a different pool that could also be pulled from...I am still really confused as to why nobody from [Housing & Residence Life] is having to pull any of these shifts.”
For Hudson, Public Safety shifts have become a hindrance to completing the HVAC work that needs to be finished on campus, especially during the rush of transitioning buildings to heating for the winter. In addition to the seasonal crush, Hudson is the only supervisor for his students, meaning that no HVAC projects can be completed when he is working for Public Safety. While his four-hour daytime shifts are inconvenient, overnight Public Safety shifts and their mandatory following day off severely cut into the amount of working days he and his crew have per week.
“My students are suffering because this is the first year there's been an HVAC crew in a long time, and I've only got freshmen,” Hudson said. “I don't have anybody that's [an] upperclassman [who could supervise other students]. I'm not set up for success in the best way at this point.”
Smith emphasized that the Public Safety office is actively hiring staff members to fill openings, along with increasing pay to help aid in recruitment efforts.
“We've substantially increased the wages for our public safety officers, as we realized...that the college's wages had fallen well below Asheville area norms for this type of position,” Smith said. “We've corrected that and we're seeing really good results from our recruiting efforts.”
Hudson hopes that these positions can be filled quickly, allowing him to return to the growing list of projects that need to be finished as cooler temperatures set in. He expects that he will continue to work Public Safety shifts for at least two more weeks, which will continue to stall progress on urgent projects.
“I’m missing a day a week [of HVAC work], and [the rest of the week is] mostly playing catch-up,” Hudson said.
Many members of the facilities team, from supervisors like Hudson to student crew members like Gaskins, emphasized their desire for patience from other members of the campus community. While they understand that frustrations arise when maintenance is not completed as quickly as students and faculty might like, they reiterated that everyone on the team does the best that they can within the limitations that they have.
“Everyone here is working constantly and working extremely hard,” Smith said. “Sometimes there are miscommunications, sometimes we get a work order from a month ago that we just didn't see...Everyone down here cares so much about this school, and [is] kind of just trying to make it run at their own expense sometimes.”
Despite these obstacles, the hardworking supervisors, staff members and students of the facilities team still show up ready to work, whether they are repainting a bathroom stall or repairing an HVAC system. Their collaboration and dedication, tangible expressions of the idealistic values of a work college, keep campus functioning day in and day out.