Photo and story by Patrick McCready
Are you struggling with classes, life or any personal issues? Then the Peninsula College CARE team can help you.
This is PC’s version of a national movement that many universities have already joined under another name: Behavioral Intervention Team or BIT. To trace the origins of the program, we need to probe back in time to when Virginia Tech had its shooting back in 2007.
According to research done by mental health professionals, the shooter himself suffered from behaviors of concern in isolation. These went unaddressed by staff at Virginia Tech.
The goal of the teams themselves, whether called BIT or CARE, are to create an avenue for troubled individuals to seek help in a safe way.
“They found out that communication was the biggest breakdown. There was behavior that was happening on campus but there wasn’t a mechanism to share that,” said PC Campus Safety and Operations Manager Marty Martinez. “So Behavioral Intervention Teams was coined.”
PC felt that the BIT acronym sent the wrong mes- sage, so they adopted the CARE model instead, as other schools have done. The program was established at PC in 2014.
Cathy Engle, Associate Dean for Student Success and chair of the program said that the goal is to connect students to resources they need for whatever situation they might be in. Reports to the CARE Team are completely anonymous and can be submitted privately. This system is for both staff and students alike, though the system is just this year being rolled out for student use.
“Why we waited to roll this out to students was to get all of this working really well,” Engle said. “We are now a well oiled machine at this point.”
Conduct reports, or reports of physical incidents on campus, have decreased significantly since 2014, according to Trisha Haggerty, Executive Assistant of Student Services. These could be the keying of a car or the breaking of a keyboard in a classroom. In 2014, these types of incidents accounted for 51% of reports to the Team, compared to 5% in 2017.
Sandi Macintosh, educational planner and mental health counselor at PC, said that we need more mental health awareness as the program is being rolled out. Macintosh would like to see more students take an interest in supporting one another. “I think the awareness needs to happen as well as education,” she said.
Counselors are also needed to meet the needs of students, as well as members of the regular community, said Engle. “With the roll-out of care to faculty and staff, we’ve kind of maxed out Sandi’s availability,” she reflected.
Engle also added that she has reached out to the Associated Student Council about Mental Health First Aid for students. This involves training for response to mental breakdowns as they happen.
Reports to the CARE Team are completely anonymous and can be directed to pccares@pencol.edu. Reports can also be submitted by filling out a form at www.pencol.edu/pccares.