The end of the academic year may bring a sigh of relief to Allegheny College students, but some of their former neighbors are sighing for an entirely different reason.

Although most of the students occupying off-campus housing have departed, remnants of the 2008-09 school year have been left behind. Piled along the streets, to be exact.

“We’re working on that,” Rick Williams, the city’s planning and development manager, said Friday, speaking of the refuse piled along some streets on the north end of town.

Ditto for the college. In fact, special pickups along Prospect and Birch streets and Ellicott Court are scheduled for early next week.

However, both Williams and Larry Lee, the college’s associate vice president for finance and planning, agree that extra efforts should not be necessary.

The city’s contract with its residential trash hauler allows for the pickup of a maximum of three 36-gallon trash cans of refuse and garbage each week. In addition, plastic, glass and metal recyclables — including cook stoves, washers and dryers — are collected every other week. On alternate weeks, recyclable paper products — including newspapers, magazines and corrugated cardboard are picked up.

For the first time this year, additional collection services are available through the city’s tag program. Large items — sofas, chairs, mattresses, box springs, rolled carpet and televisions, to name just a few — will be collected if a tag purchased either on-line or at the city building on Water Street for $21 is attached. Appliances with freon will be picked up if identified with a tag costing $36 and an unlimited number of extra bags bearing $4 tags will also be taken away.

Unfortunately, a number of students — and their landlords — have opted to not take advantage of the new tag program.

“The refuse company is doing its job,” Williams said Friday, noting that the city’s only option when it comes to stuff left along the side of the street is sending a formal notice of the violation to the landlord and waiting for a response before taking further action. That process is already underway; according to Williams, a list of offending properties is now being assembled.

If simply too many bags were put out, that problem will be resolved with future pickups at the rate of three bags per week, Williams added.

As for the college, a crew always goes right out after move-out day, Lee explained Friday. One round of pickups focusing primarily on college-owned homes is complete, but that wasn’t enough. Of all the houses on the three streets slated for next week’s cleanup, the college owns only one. “All the rest are landlord-owned,” Lee said.

“We’re always hopeful that the landlords who rent to the students will show the initiative to do the same for their properties,” he continued.

The irony, according to Lee, is that the college collecting garbage in some areas may be counterproductive. “I think because we do that, the landlords of those rental homes don’t clean up after them,” he said.