New ‘wellness center’ planned for renovation at MCCC campus
Need for centralized place to help homeless, hungry students more evident
POTTSTOWN >> It can be hard to stay focused on that lecture on the digestive system if your own stomach is constantly reminding you it’s empty.
Of if you’re worried about how you’ll get back home, or to work, after class.
Or if your baby-sitter just canceled.
But those are the kinds of worries often faced by community college students, even in affluent Montgomery County.
Unlike many four-year schools, where students live and focus almost exclusively on academics, many community college students are part-time, also work and have families and the challenges that come with everyday life, she said.
Addressing those worries, connecting those students to the services that can help, will help those students succeed, said Victoria Bastecki-Perez.
Bastecki-Perez, interim president of Montgomery County Community College, was speaking to a roundtable of college, state and county officials in the North Hall conference room of the college’s Pottstown campus Friday.
“Some may think these are not things our students need, but they do,” BasteckiPerez.
She said the main campus of the college in Blue Bell is across the road from a country club and the campus looks “like any fouryear college. So when we addressed our board and told them some of our students are homeless and have food needs, they were astounded.”
In addition to basic needs like food and shelter, community college students can often struggle with getting mental health, physical health or transportation challenges addressed.
Keima Sheriff, assistant dean for student programs at the college, offered up the example of a student who needs medication for a mental health issue but could not arrange for a medical professional to prescribe and schedule it.
As a result of that small problem, the entire support system to keep that student in class and moving steadily toward graduation threatened to collapse.
“That student may not finish but have student debts to pay off. That family’s entire plan may have depended on getting that degree. And here we see the repercussions, creating a long-lasting life challenge that began with a small discreet need,” Sheriff said.
Those needs can be as basic as hunger.
Sheiff said a small food pantry started in 2014 at the Pottstown has grown steadily in size and use by students and even staff and faculty. “When we started, it was just a cabinet.”
Offering a subsequent tour of the food pantry, Amy Auwaerter, assistant dean of student services at the Pottstown campus, said “we try to make it something students want to eat, but is also healthy.”
The better the college came to recognize these needs, the better it came to understand the need to improve how these needs are met, said David Kowalski, executive director of institutional research at the college.
The college found the delivery of human services to be “opaque, disjointed, unsustainable, well-intentioned, but limited in scope,” according to Kowalski’s presentation Friday.
“Students were not sure what we offered, and what we do offer was housed in different areas of the college,” he said.
That’s why, as plans for the $4 million renovation to the Pottstown campus are being drawn up, the administration went to the students and discovered the need to include plans for a Wellness Center, a central location where those challenges can be overcome, or students can be directed to the agencies that can help.
That was good news to Teresa Miller, Pennsylvania’s Secretary of Human Services, who was among those sitting at the roundtable.
“This is really exciting,” said Miller, who lamented the fact that often enough, those referred to an agency for help, may never get connected and get the help they need.
“We lose people. I hear the same sentiment every place I go. ‘We referred them, but we never know if they ever got there,’”
Miller said.
That’s why, she said, Pennsylvania is undergoing a plan to implement a new statewide “loop-back” system that keeps track of people’s referrals and allows for follow-ups.
Valerie Arkoosh, chairwoman of the Montgomery County Commissioners, said the county had looked at implementing something similar “and it’s very challenging. That’s why we were so glad to find out it’s going to be done on a statewide basis.”
Ultimately, she said, it will help ensure those services for basic needs like food, shelter, health and transportation, all funded through taxpayer dollars, are as efficient as possible.
Miller was particularly focused on food insecurity Friday.
After visiting
Pottstown,
she attended the fifth-annual conference of the Montgomery County Anti-Hunger Network to discuss food security throughout the commonwealth.
There are more than 1.53 million Pennsylvanians who experience chronic hunger and food insecurity — the lack of access to reliable and nutritious meals — every day. Food insecurity also has direct ties to increased risks for chronic diseases, poorer overall health, and increased health care costs, according to a press release from Miller’s office.
“More than 1.7 million people in Pennsylvania rely” on the federally funded Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) “to get them through the month,” Miller said in the release.
“We also know, however, that there are many thousands more who are eligible for SNAP who choose to get by without public assistance or aren’t aware that it’s an option for them,” said Miller. “For SNAP recipients, and for many others, the charitable food network is an absolutely critical piece of the puzzle that makes it possible for people to meet their basic needs month after month.”
The release from Miller’s office highlighted three recent federal changes and proposals to SNAP that “could exacerbate food insecurity for some of Pennsylvania’s most vulnerable citizens and cause added strain on food pantries:”
• The United States Department of Agriculture published a final rule effective on April 1, that restricts states’ ability to determine which counties can be waived from work requirements for able-bodied adults without dependents, which are waived due to local unemployment rates. This rule change will jeopardize access to SNAP for more than 90,000 people, many of whom struggle with mental health, substance use disorder, and other long-term conditions that would be worsened by chronic hunger.
• In October, the USDA issued a proposed rule to alter the method Pennsylvania uses to determine the Heating/Cooling Standard Utility Allowance, which considers utility costs when calculating a person’s monthly SNAP benefit. This change could negatively affect approximately 775,000 Pennsylvania households.
• In July, the USDA announced a proposed rule that would eliminate Broad Based Categorical Eligibility for SNAP, which is a policy that gives states the flexibility to determine appropriate income thresholds and extend SNAP benefits to low-income families and individuals who would otherwise struggle to afford food. This rule could jeopardize food access for more than 200,000 people across Pennsylvania.
“None of these rules do anything to help people on a path to self-sufficiency,” Miller said in the press release.