GAMBIER – Last spring, when the country and college campuses shut down for the COVID-10 pandemic, Kenyon College made sure students knew how to receive help dealing with the crisis if they needed it.
“For those who are in the state of Ohio, we offered them the option for telehealth and/or tele-mental health,” Christopher Smith, director of health and counseling at Kenyon, told the Mount Vernon News. “For the students who were outside of Ohio, we were limited by the state lines. Our providers couldn’t do anything for them.”
So the college helped the out-of-state students find health care resources in their home town.
The school also started a partnership with Talkspace, the online counseling service.
“What that did for us is give us the ability as a college to give students outside the state of Ohio an option to connect with a counselor,” Smith said.
This fall, Kenyon started the “flexible care model” for counseling.
“It really works to get students in quicker,” Smith said. “It starts with a 30-minute consult just to really assess where they are. If we meet their needs, they don’t need to come back. If we meet their needs and they still need counseling care, we can still engage in the traditional model of counseling, which is typically a 45-minute appointment.”
Kenyon also has a partnership with ProtoCall, a 24-hour crisis-support line.
“Students can use that service free of charge,” Smith said.
It wasn’t just the pandemic that was causing stress for students in 2020. The police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis and other deaths added stress to an already stressful year and prompted the college to add a list of resources on its website where students could find help.
“We’ve done a lot better job communicating with our students,” Smith said. “We created four videos in April 2020 dealing with things like managing anxiety, grief and loss; and academic life and stress.”
Students are now returning to campus, which Smith says helps.
“Being on campus brings a certain nostalgia and love for those students when they stepped on campus after being away for a year,” he said. “But it’s a different campus.”
The college is operating differently, with testing and other safety protocols in place due to the pandemic. Counseling, for example, is still not face to face.
“There is not a safe way to have persons in a shared office unless both parties are wearing masks,” Smith said.
Counseling involves non-verbal communications such as facial expressions.
“It’s really hard to do that if you are wearing a mask,” Smith said.
For this semester at least, counseling at Kenyon remains virtual.
