Field Assignment 2

Dorm Baby… What to do what to do?



A Fremont Hall resident gave birth to a baby girl in bathroom.



Cal Poly students awoke to Monday classes and a baby? Sunday evening at roughly 4:30 pm a Fremont resident gave birth to a baby girl in the dorm’s third floor bathroom.

Emergency personnel arrived to the scene to find the mother holding the baby in a towel. Both mother and baby were taken to a hospital and are ok according to officials.

So it happened, there was a baby on campus. Now what to do? The aftermath can be worse than the storm. Picking up the pieces of a life now torn apart by the harsh limelight. Acquaintances that did not want to be mentioned say that she wants to come back and pick up where she left off. Get back into her life and move forward.

“I feel sorry for her, whoever she is. Everybody is talking about her and I’m sure all she wanted was to have the baby and not have the whole world know,” a fellow freshman Shelley Dangoor said about the incident.

But how as a Resident Advisor or Community Advisor supposed to deal with such a rare incident? Resident Advisors and Community Advisors or less formally known as RA’s and CA’s are the hired students that look over the various dorms and halls on campus.

According to Julie Rudd a Fremont Resident the RA’s in Fremont and on campus, in general, have been doing a good job keeping this whole episode under wraps.

“They are doing a good job of keeping a balance of being supportive, but not condoning it… They are respecting the residents privacy.”

The kind of protocol that is being implemented during this time is lots of signs asking the students not to speak to the media. Having the Head of Affairs come and speak to the residents, specifically in Fremont, regarding the situation. As well as, the Community Supervisor or CSD, Ashley Wendell spoke the following Monday. She spoke in the hopes to confront the students and have an open discussion about what they knew and how they felt… to gather all the facts.

Unfortunately Wendell could not be reached on the matter, but it appears that there was little to no suspicion that the Resident was pregnant. Jessica Hudson another acquaintance of the Resident said that [she] “had just seen her the week before. I thought is was the Freshmen 15… I never suspected she was pregnant, because she wasn’t big. She always complained about how stressed she was from school. I thought it was due to the stress. Not Pregnancy!”

Another student Shawn Christensen attributed the event to being “tragic” for all involved. “I don’t understand why she was compelled to keep it a secreat? Its unfortunate to think that there wasn’t someone that she trusted enough to help her through the pregnancy. It’s just tragic…”

But through this event her name is still unknown to the majority of students and it appears that even though students are discussing the affair, those that know her are keeping her name and any other information private.



Author: Erica Davis

May 1, 2008

Word Count: 534