Brian Hemphill
Scott Peska
by Joe King
NIU has announced the creation of a new office to provide long-term assistance to those most affected by the Feb. 14 shootings in Cole Hall.
The Office of Support and Advocacy will serve as a centralized resource for all students, faculty and staff who were in Cole Hall at the time of the tragedy. The office also will serve as a point of contact for families of deceased students.
“The campus community as a whole has a tremendous amount of healing to do,” NIU Provost Ray Alden said. “However, those who were in Cole Hall that day may have particular needs, and this office is intended to ensure that they are provided with the utmost support.”
The office will provide assistance for as long as needed, said NIU Vice President of Student Affairs Brian O. Hemphill.
“We know from speaking to colleagues at Virginia Tech and other schools that have experienced tragedies of this magnitude that events like these can cause emotional trauma on campus long after the event, and this office will help those individuals cope with those issues,” Hemphill said.
In most instances, the office will not be the direct provider of services. Instead, it will act as a clearinghouse, helping to identify the services students need and assisting them in establishing connections with the correct providers.
“We will be a place where students directly touched by this tragedy can come for help with all sorts of issues,” said Scott Peska, who was selected by Hemphill to lead the office. “It will be our job to determine who can best help them and to see that the assistance is delivered.”
In the near future, those needs might include helping injured students secure classroom adaptations that make it easier for them to attend class as they recuperate from injuries, or linking them with tutors or other academic support. In the more distant future, the office might assist students in creating or finding support groups or securing private counseling services.
“We can’t really say what everyone’s needs might be, but we do know that they will change over time, so we will do our best to evolve along with them,” said Peska, who believes the links he has established across campus as director of the First-Year Connections program will be useful in correctly directing students.
Assisting Peska in those efforts will be a staff of five: an assistant director in charge of counseling services (that individual will be a licensed psychologist), an assistant director in charge of programs and support, a victims’ assistance advocate, a secretary and a graduate assistant.
In addition to working with affected students, faculty, staff and families, the office also will assist in the collection and archiving of material related to the event; participate in discussions regarding creation of a memorial; and serve as a point of contact for groups or individuals wishing to do fundraising relating to Feb. 14. The office also will help plan any commemorative events.
Other universities that have been through tragedies similar in scale have found such offices very useful.
At Virginia Tech, where April 16 will mark the first anniversary of a shooting spree that took 32 lives, the Office of Recovery and Support has played a role similar to what is envisioned for the OSA.
That office has done everything from organizing regular dinners for students injured or traumatized by the shootings and working with faculty to make classrooms less traumatizing to monitoring the emotional wellbeing of faculty and staff directly affected by the shootings. The office also is helping to plan the memorial services and activities that will mark the first anniversary of the tragedy.
Officials at VT believe that the demands on the office will diminish over time. However, administrators at Texas A&M University have found that their Office of Student Assistance remains useful nine years after the tragedy that helped lead to its creation.
In the aftermath of the bonfire collapse that killed 12 students at TAMU in the spring of 1999, the university discovered that many different departments on campus were duplicating efforts and that it was often difficult for students to locate the services they needed.
This led to the eventual creation of The Office of Student Assistance, which operates much as OSA is expected to function. However, as students directly touched by that tragedy graduated or left campus, the office remained in operation, continuing in its role as a clearinghouse for students in need of services, but opening its doors to the entire campus community.
“For us, it’s become a place where people can come for any type of assistance, and we will help them sort things out,” said TAMU Dean of Student Life Dave Parrott.
NIU’s Office of Support and Advocacy will open for business Thursday, April 3. It is located in Gilbert Hall, Room B123, and can be reached by calling (815) 753-0490.