BATON ROUGE — Southern University is receiving $3.3 million in federal funding as the campus deals with repeated power outages that have disrupted student life.

The U.S. Department of Education awarded $14.2 million to historically Black colleges and universities nationwide. Southern University is set to receive $3.3 million of that allocation.

Students have felt the outages firsthand. "The Wi-Fi isn't working, so even if we do want to try to catch up on work, we can't," one student said.

Another student described conditions on campus. "It's super duper hot. The union lights went out like 4 times inside of the union. It's just like the lights — how, how we going to function with no," the student said.

Chancellor John Pierre said the federal dollars will help address infrastructure, technology, and academic program needs. "All of this is very, very helpful for us to be able to continue to function as a Research 2 institution, which is very, very important to us and again as a transformational change agent for our students."

Pierre said some of the $3.3 million will go toward strengthening the electrical grid. The university has already spent about $2 million addressing electrical issues and had about $1.5 million in deferred maintenance funds available to help cover those costs.

Pierre said the university will also use some of the funding to complete campus repairs that were delayed due to a lack of money and resources. "Deferred maintenance all across higher education in Louisiana is a major problem and the legislature, to its credit, has taken on those issues," Pierre said. "The dollars haven't come in as fast as we would have liked, but these things take time. And what we have to be able to do is to have great conversations about how to get those things done. This is not a time for recrimination."

A planned partial power outage is scheduled for this Saturday as crews work to stabilize and improve the electrical distribution system. Pierre said only a small part of campus will be affected and that generators will keep residential halls and four dorms running during the outage.

Pierre said the university expects full power to be restored by Sunday in time for homecoming week, which includes a parade Sunday afternoon starting at 1 p.m.

Looking further ahead, Pierre said the university expects an assessment within the next 30 to 45 days to map out longer-term solutions.

"The transformers, the switchgear, all of those things, the cabling, all of those things that we've done a comprehensive review of," Pierre said, "and we're going to get an assessment to us probably in the next 30 to 45 days to look at the longer-term solutions so that we have a 20- or 25-year solution rather than a 2-year solution. That's the real, real key for us,” he said.