22 DECEMBER 1-7, 2022 westword.com WESTWORD | MUSIC | CAFE | CULTURE | NIGHT+DAY | LETTERS | CONTENTS | according to the state education department. Colorado College has also been working with the El Paso County Collaborative for Suicide Prevention, an organization work- ing to reduce suicides in the county 20 per- cent by 2024, to see if there are parts of the program that could be implemented at CC. Colorado College currently has eight counselors, fi ve of them BIPOC and two bilingual. The school has four psychologists and a nurse practitioner as well, Dickey notes. Some of the counselors are part-time, however, so CC is looking at how it can in- crease hours. BIPOC students, in particular, say they would appreciate more time with counselors; some alumni say that there was a shortage of BIPOC counselors in the past, and current students say they’ve experi- enced long wait times for a BIPOC counselor. The school also has a 24/7 counseling line and a Sexual Assault Response Coordinator on call, though some students say they don’t feel one coordinator is enough. “It’s also important to note that counsel- ing is just one part of the picture,” Dickey says. “A lot of times when we think about mental health and wellness, we jump to, ‘Everybody needs clinical intervention.’ What are the basic things to be a well person? Are we eating right? Are we taking time for ourselves during the day? All of these things scaffold on each other.” As Colorado College grapples with three student deaths in fi ve months, the school is coming up with a system for handling such tragic events. “What we’re working on right now is even creating a further set of protocols that we can also share with the campus in terms of when communications go out,” Dickey says. “Who are the people that are fi rst on site to respond, particularly when there’s been a student death? That’s part of better communication; that’s something we really need to do a better job of, is having better communication.” Students would attest to that. Many have criticized the administration for minimizing information about student deaths when memorials are called for. According to Dickey, the school follows certain guidelines to ensure that discussions surrounding student deaths do not glorify suicide. Those guidelines call for communi- cating with the campus as soon as possible and not always mentioning that a student died from suicide. But some students feel the administra- tion’s actions after a death aren’t enough, which is what inspired the blank edition of The Catalyst. “I thought that was a powerful message,” Dickey says. Along with the blank paper, editors of The Catalyst published a tribute edition to their colleague who had committed suicide on May 19. It commemorated his life and time at CC, including his work on The Catalyst and his impact on the community. Friends, teammates and co-workers shared poems, stories, memories and pic- tures. The edition was a collective moment of grief for those who knew and loved the student, and was intended for distribution at a rugby game that day. But fi rst, mental health professionals and CC communications managers reached out to the Catalyst editors. “The edition of The Catalyst that might have been about our student that we lost in May was for a select group of students; it was not widely publicized on campus, and students at the student newspaper did have conversations with our VP for strategic communication [and] with our mental health professionals to say, ‘How can we fi gure out how to honor our students without again going against best practices of ‘You cannot glorify a suicide’?” Dickey recalls. “Honestly, there’s not always points of agreement.” There’s a fi ne line between honoring stu- dents who passed and glorifying suicide, she adds: “When we do gatherings, we get to be honest and...let people bring their authentic selves and their emotions — ‘I’m angry, I’m sad, I’m frustrated, I’m confused’ — but we do not memorialize. You have to be very careful memorializing, because students who are also struggling with mental health can see that as a glorifi cation of suicide.” On the same day that The Catalyst pub- lished the blank paper and distributed the memorial issue, someone disturbed a hockey game at Ed Robson Arena. “Multiple observ- ers who witnessed the incident up close reported that the protester had a small pair of scissors in their hand that they were using to try and pierce their neck,” The Catalyst later reported. The protester was not a CC student. After he was escorted out of the arena and to Me- morial Hospital, the game continued. Some students saw that as another example of the school going about business as usual, without mental health breaks. “CC once again failed to handle a distressing situation with [the] care their students are demanding,” said one Instagram post. President L. Song Richardson sent an email to the campus the next morning. “The events of last night were traumatic to a community already coping with tragedy,” she wrote. “I know from my meetings with students and from the legitimate concerns being raised across campus that we need to do better for the health of our whole com- munity. I commit to doing all that I can to examine how we do that.” On November 4, members of a newly formalized group, the Colorado Student Coalition for Institutional Change, showed up at the Colorado College Board of Trustees Meeting, many of them wearing black, to bring attention to the fact that many of the improvements at the school had been pushed by minority students, who were often not the face of these movements but were the ones most affected by what’s going on. While only one of the three students who died over the past fi ve months was a person of color, BIPOC students continue to push hard for changes that could help the entire campus. “I think that what seems very clear to me is that there is this very clear histori- cal pattern of the burden of care falling on oftentimes marginalized BIPOC students who are doing most of this work and also maybe suffering the most and hurting the most,” Gibson says. “It’s really exhausting. It’s a heavy weight to bear in this world.” Email the author at [email protected]. A Hard Lesson continued from page 20
