Before the Ridgewood Cottages are demolished this May, administrators said they must decide how to compensate for the temporary loss of the quad's 109 beds. Dean of Student Life Rick Sawyer said that although no plan is in place, the Department of Residence Life is considering a number of options.

The University has spent the past two fall semesters and this semester remodeling first-year residence halls in North Quad and completed them in time for the arrival of the midyear class each January.

Sawyer said the University may hold off on renovating a first-year residence next fall due to the added housing constraints of the Ridgewood demolition.

"We may have to bypass that for a couple of years," Sawyer said. "It's been nice to do that because it gave a nice place for midyears to move into when they arrived in January. But eventually we would have run out [of dorms to remodel]."

Director of Residence Life Richard DeCapua said he hopes it doesn't have to come to holding off on renovations.

"From my perspective, I think it's a real gift that we have the ability to do renovations of a building every year, and when we're losing beds I would hate to give that up," DeCapua said.

It's important to continue renovating and constructing "to get the best of both worlds and keep doing what we're doing now without coming to a screeching halt," DeCapua said.

The new Ridgewood Cottages will be completed by winter 2009 and include around 250 beds in an apartment-style setting, according to the University's Capital Projects Web site.

"It's going to be creative to be able to do everything that we want to do at one time," DeCapua said.

Sawyer said the University is also discussing ways to free up a few floors of upperclassmen housing for midyears.

Residence Life is considering offering students who study abroad during the spring semester of their junior year guaranteed housing for senior year, Sawyer said.

"But the guaranteed housing is where we would want them to be," Sawyer said, adding that this may mean some upperclassmen will live in East Quad.

Sawyer said he hopes if a dorm's floors are divided among different class years that they will congeal as smoothly as possible.

DeCapua said that Residence Life will try to keep Ziv Quad and the Foster Mods available primarily to upperclassmen.

"We're not going to move sophomores into Ziv and kick the upperclassmen out," he said. "It doesn't make any sense."

Other ideas include shrinking the first-year class size or changing the class designations for residence halls, Student Life administrators said.

Housing for graduate students on campus may be reserved for undergraduates instead, said Assistant Dean of Student Life Maggie Balch, formerly the director of ResLife.

"I can't imagine [graduate students] would be happy with that, just as undergraduates wouldn't be happy with losing 109 beds," said Balch.

Balch said Residence Life has started looking into class-housing designations for next year, something the office normally does later in the school year.

"It's a big, big jigsaw puzzle and is not all settled yet, but there are all kinds of little nuances like that," Sawyer said.