We have all been shaken by the recent events at Columbine High School in Colorado, especially people who have children and work in some capacity with the youth of our nation. As advisers, we may sit back and wonder why people couldn't see the signs that these youth were in trouble? Surely, their grades, their anti-social behavior in the school, and what we suspect were obvious signs to the parents in their daily lives should have been waving “red flags” to all in authority that these young men needed help!
What we don't think about is if this event occurred six months later, it would have been an event on your or my campus, because those students would have been in a college by then.
From my experience at four different colleges in nineteen years, we generally function in academia with what I call “functional blinders” on. We live and operate in compartmentalized worlds. We do our academic advising, but it's resident life that handles issues of behavior and events in the dorms. Public Safety handles events of unacceptable behavior that occur everywhere but the dorms on our campus. Our athletic departments want to handle all the “risk” events with those students who are involved with the school teams, while our campus ministry program and counseling programs provide spiritual and psychological support to just those who seek that support (or are identified as needing it).
We live and practice in a “college world” very similar to the world which caused everyone to miss the “obvious clues” in Littleton. The school administrators were not told issues by the parents. Information given to the police was not shared with the schools. Students did not voice their concerns and experiences to those in authority. Everyone kept their piece of information to themselves, and no one ever got the full picture until it was too late! It sounds very similar to the compartmentalized world that college administrators and advisers generally function in.
In a typical college environment, we don't even have that parental influence and control to assist us. We consider and treat the students as “adults” even though they have little-to-no experience with being one. Perhaps the time has come to rethink our strategy of service, especially to those who are having problems living and learning on their own! Instead of the traditional approach of taking a reactive posture (dealing with problems after they occur), we may want to consider adopting a more pro-active approach to head off the multiple-problem situations which can escalate into situations like Columbine High. Although some schools may have a cooperative environment that easily facilitates this, others will have to modify their environment to create a system which will enable them to identify students who have multiple difficulties.
Utilization of a full-team approach to servicing our students, especially those who need our intervention, guidance, and assistance the most, may be the best way to accomplish this. We need to throw off the apathy, the “it's not my department” attitude with which many have been operating and take a leadership position in pulling together our campus community to share information and identify those at risk. Although units may place the “records confidentiality” issue as a roadblock to true open discourse, all should be able to, at least, start with a list of at-risk students, identified by their school ID numbers. This would remove name recognition as an issue. At-risk students with serious problems should be listed by more than one department. Only when the same ID number appeared on other department's lists, would the respective departments get together to explore what they could share and to work jointly to present a more unified and comprehensive plan of action to assist the student.
Only by instituting a program of regular meetings between the advising community, student and resident life, public safety, counseling, and ministry programs, we can identify to each other those who are at risk in our respective operations.