Fresno City College Psychological Services Center is working with staff and faculty to coordinate a new intervention program that will assist troubled students. Brian Olowude, coordinator of psychological services and Chris Villa, vice president of student services are spear heading the implementation of this plan.
“We’re very close to launching it, officially,” Olowude said. “It’s designed to assist the campus as a whole in assisting students.”
According to Olowude, the proposed plan will involve assembling a behavior intervention team, or BIT, that would decide appropriate interventions for students who are reportedly struggling mentally or emotionally. These students would likely be referred by FCC faculty, staff, or students. Appropriate interventions could include that the student in question undergoes counseling; receive temporary suspension, recommendation to receive outside treatment or a voluntary withdrawal.
“There is no one way we’re going to handle it,” Olowude said. “Every situation will have to be looked at individually.”
Olowude says this program is also designed to educate students and staff on how to “recognize students of concern.” He proposes one way he may help educate the staff is by teaching them how to recognize “problematic” writing assignments by a student, that may or may not be cause for concern. He also will educate both staff and students on the type of behaviors that would be considered a cause for concern.
“We’re really just going with people’s best intentions and just giving them more information of how to move those best intentions to best interventions” Olowude said.
According to Chris Villa students are mainly referred to his office for violations of the FCC student code of conduct. Violations include, but are not limited to, plagiarism and disruptive behavior.
Once a student is referred, Villa must make a disruptive student report or other give appropriate consequences. The proposed BIT is designed to address concerns about students whose behavior has not violated the student code of conduct, but may pose a danger to themselves or students around them.
Chris Villa believes this plan will benefit everyone of campus. “ It (the plan) helps us, in a more focused way, identify students who may not know or be aware of services that are available that can address psychological, health related or any other-related kind of behavior that could be detrimental to the student and to others around them,” he said.
Villa also believes this new intervention team will help keep the campus safe. “ In some cases we do have people on our campus who demonstrate behavior which would be considered abnormal and we are concerned about that,” Villa said.
He is aware that they will likely run into complications while setting this plan in action. “There will be challenges because of constraints of our time,” Villa said. “ But because this is a priority, because this is an emerging issue…it’s important enough for us to, at least, pull together a group like this to mitigate the potential for an incident of the type of nature we’ve seen on other college campuses where violence has happened and people have actually been injured and in some cases, like in Virginia Tech., some were killed.”
Another area of concern is the validity of student referrals to the BIT. Olowude assures that false referrals will not go unrecognized.“We wouldn’t want BIT referral to be used as a form of revenge or manipulation,” he said. “Decisions won’t be made in a vacuum. We’ll make sure we have as much information as we need to make sure we make the most appropriate recommendations and decisions.”
Eileen Houtzer, an intern of the psychology center, supports the plan. “I think we need an integrated approach so that everybody knows what to do if a student is having trouble in school,” she said. “We definitely want the faculty to know what to do and to really work closely with psychological services.”
According to Ernie Garcia, Chris Villa’s dept. secretary, between Fall 2010 and Spring 2010 semesters 88 disruptive student reports were filed by Villa’s office and there were 116 police incidents involving students on campus.