ATU completes $9 million Jones Residence Hall renovation

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Arkansas Tech University (ATU) has completed a $9 million renovation of the Jones Residence Hall, and will hold a grand opening Oct. 12 at the hall on the Russellville campus. The facility can house 192 students.

Jones Residence Hall was under consideration for renovation in February 2021 when a record-breaking cold snap led to burst pipes inside the building. The damage caused ATU to temporarily close the building and expand the scope of the renovation. The ATU Board of Trustees approved funding for the Jones renovation in May 2021 and the project began on Sept. 30, 2022.

“The Jones Residence Hall renovation project was really a complete gut job,” Drew Dickey, ATU director of facilities management, said in Monday’ (Aug. 26) announcement. “The project started with a demo contractor coming into the building and taking it back to the block structural walls and starting over. Our design team didn’t consider the original layout, aside from any structural walls that couldn’t be moved, and designed a totally new interior layout.”

Renovation work included interior demolition and abatement, plumbing and drain relocations, complete re-design of the interior spaces, standing new walls in newly redesigned spaces, replacing interior finishes, addition of a fire sprinkler system, and installation of an elevator.

The renovated Jones Residence Hall partially opened to host university guests during the April 2024 total solar eclipse, but the fall 2024 semester marks the first time the building has been fully open during a school year since the February 2021 damage.

The building is named for Charles Jones. She taught psychology and education courses at Arkansas Tech from 1938-71. She in the United Service Organizations (USO) during the final two years of World War II (1944-45) and was deployed to British Guiana.

On campus, she was head of the psychology department from the time ATU became a four-year college until her retirement. Jones wrote the $26,000 grant proposal that established Arkansas Tech’s social and rehabilitation services program, which began operation in 1969. At the beginning of the program, there were only 12 others like it in the United States.

A graduate of Galloway Women’s College and the University of Arkansas, Jones taught in the public schools at Blytheville, Brookland, Cotton Plant and Joiner before she was hired at ATU.

The Arkansas Tech Board of Trustees voted in August 1966 to name the women’s residence hall under construction in Jones’ honor. The building was dedicated in November 1967. Jones died on April 24, 1979. She was 78.