Before anything else, separate what you observe from what you assume. "The room smells musty" is an observation. "The building is making my student sick" is a conclusion — and you don't need to reach it yet. Start by simply naming what you're seeing, smelling, or hearing about, without deciding what it means.

Open a notes app, a document, or a plain notebook, and start writing down dates: when the smell started, when a symptom first showed up, when a leak happened, when a maintenance request was submitted. A timeline you start today is more valuable than a perfect one you try to reconstruct in six months.

Take photos — wide shots of the whole room, and close-ups of anything specific (a stain, a vent, a damaged wall). Photograph again if anything changes, especially after a "repair." Keep the original files; don't rely on screenshots of screenshots.

Save emails. If you talk to housing by phone, send a short follow-up email summarizing what was said — this creates a written record where none existed before. Keep maintenance request numbers and confirmation emails, even the ones that seem routine.

Mold, water intrusion, indoor air quality, older-building concerns — these terms get thrown around, but they mean different things and raise different questions. Our Building Concerns section explains the basics in plain language, without telling you what conclusion to reach.

Once you have more than a few data points, it helps to have them somewhere structured rather than scattered across your phone, email, and memory. Our Dorm Documentation Kit gives you ready-made logs for exactly this.

Depending on what you find, the right next call might be a healthcare provider, an environmental professional, your student's disability/accommodations office, or eventually an attorney. We can't tell you which one you need — but we can help you walk into that conversation organized instead of overwhelmed.