Since returning to school after winter break, many UNC Asheville residential students have found mold growing in their bathrooms and are frustrated by the ongoing issue.
Jensen McDonald, 20, is a resident of Founders Hall. He said that he and his suitemates have been battling mold growth since the beginning of fall semester.
“We started to see it forming in early November,” said McDonald. “The mold was forming from the base of the shower up the shower curtain.”
McDonald said that his suitemates and himself have done everything they can think of to stop the mold from growing back, to no avail.
“From the very start we would open the doors when we got done taking a shower and put the curtain up so the mold couldn’t build up but it just kept growing back and we don’t know why,” McDonald said.
McDonald said he feels frustrated by the recurring mold issue, especially since he has sickle cell disease which makes him very susceptible to illness. While he did not get sick, in the beginning of the semester, his suitemate contracted a mystery illness that he could not kick for about a week and a half.
While that sickness cannot be directly traced back to the mold in their shower, McDonald said he deals with a stuffy nose quite frequently while in the dorms. This is very common with a mold allergy.
The mold problem has been running rampant throughout Mills Hall as well. Kayla Huggins-Jones, 19, and her suitemates Natalee Jones and Hayleigh Hoffman have been dealing with it since their freshman year.
Last year, the sophomores said they found mold in their air vents, in the cracks of their shower and on the shower curtain. With the exception of it being in the air vents, the mold has come back in the same spots this year, even in a new dorm.
Their room was mold-free for the fall semester of this school year but when the girls returned from winter break, Jones said they noticed that once again they had a mold problem.
“When we saw the mold on the shower curtain we filled out a resmaint [residential maintenance] request saying ‘Hey! Can we get this cleaned?’ and they came in the next morning,” Huggins-Jones said.
While maintenance replaced their shower curtain and cleaned some of the mold in the cracks just a week ago, they said they are already noticing some regrowth on the curtain and that the cracks are filled up again.
“They [maintenance] always tell us to remove everything from inside our shower when we move out because they are going to come clean it over break but then they never do,” Hoffman said. “It looked way worse when we got back, it was gross.”
Frances Farhadi, 19, is another resident of Mills Hall who said she has had a recurring mold issue in her bathroom throughout the entire 2025-2026 school year.
Farhadi said that when she first noticed the mold in August, her suitemate filled out a resmaint request to get it looked at and was simply told to use bleach spray to clean it.
Farhadi said that herself and her suitemate chose to replace the shower curtain and add a liner, on their own dime, in hopes that the mold would not grow back again.
Unfortunately, after winter break, Farhadi said she came back to mold growth on the liner of their new shower curtain. “This [mold] issue makes me really upset and uncomfortable because we shouldn’t have mold growing in the curtains at all,” Farhadi said. “I remember first seeing the mold in August and being disappointed that it wasn’t dealt with before we moved in.”
