Planning for the Pandemic

by Patrick O'Connor, Ph.D.

I’m a little late to the pandemic preparation party, mostly because it hasn’t quite yet hit my part of the country. Still, two colleges in my state just switched to all online classes, and music concerts are being cancelled for this weekend, so it’s probably time to ask myself, what exactly will my counseling program look like if my school closes for a while?

If you’re making plans, or if you’ve already made them, see if this checklist helps your sense of readiness:

What counseling services are going to be offered while my school is closed? Before we get too far down the road of being “open for business” under difficult circumstances, it’s worth asking just what the goal is in being open in the first place. Since my work is primarily in college counseling, and admissions decisions are coming out in two weeks, my plan includes communicating with students and families who have questions about financial aid offers, college plans, admissions answers, and more.

Counselors who do more of the mental health/social-emotional side of our work are given a more challenging task. How do you offer support to students you can’t see in person? Can you? Should you? It would be easy to decide that’s just not something you can do, but if you’re the only listening ear that student has access to, maybe it’s not that easy after all.

What resources will you need to offer these services? If a student needs help, they come see you in your office. What do you do if you don’t have an office they can go to—try and talk via an online meeting platform? E-mail? Burner cell phone? Meet at a local coffee shop, where confidentiality is slim and the chances of catching what you’re trying to avoid could be greater? Which files and materials do you need to take home, and which ones are accessible online—and if you have to take anything home, how will you keep it secure? Think of all the ways students could reach out to you, then engage the ones that make the most safe sense.

What are the limits to your services? Instructors of online classes will tell you about that one student who emails at two in the morning. It’s likely you’ll run into at least one of those students when you make the jump to distance counseling. Set your boundaries now for when you’ll be doing what you’ll be doing, and stick to them-- hours of the day, days of the week, ways they can reach you, etc. Students appreciate help, but they also appreciate consistency. Just as important, so do you. Be good to yourself, too.

What does your school think of your plan? Sorting out what you’re willing to do is just the start of the journey. Your principal is going to want to make sure your offerings and availability are consistent with those of other mental health professionals (like the social worker) and the teachers, and your union may have something to say about working at all under these circumstances. There are also the legal implications of online advising that your school attorney should be thinking about—and if they aren’t, you want them to be. Show them the plan, get them to physically sign off on it, and then (and only then) are you good to go.

How are you communicating your plan? Students and parents obviously need to know the role you can play in a student’s life while school is on hiatus, but so do the rest of the adults in the building. The last thing you want is for a well-meaning teacher to decide a student really needs to talk to you, so they give the student your home address and phone, which they now have forever. Providing the parameters to your colleagues is the best way to make sure your counseling plans are a success.