Students do not attend classes in a vacuum. Though they may be tasked with learning content like French or History for 42 minutes at a time, they each come in with their own unique set of physical and emotional needs that often come into play in how they can learn.
If a student is upset from an argument they had the night before or in the car on the way into school, it often negatively impacts their ability to solely concentrate on the subject at hand. This has always been the case, and then the pandemic exploded that social / emotional need like a stick of emotional dynamite! The mental health and relational needs of today’s students are so great they must be a priority if we are going to teach and develop tomorrow’s leaders with excellence. Fortunately, the leadership at Rice is ahead of the curve in addressing these issues and has made a way for us to have a Wellness program.
We think of wellness as the unique blend of physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, and relational health and well-being of a person taken in a holistic context. Wellness also includes feeling a sense of purpose. This is something Abraham Maslow called “self-actualization”. The Hebrew word Shalom is often translated as “peace”, but it means more than just the absence of conflict. Shalom includes the presence of a life of harmony, especially in one’s relationships. When we talk about Wellness this concept of peace and relational harmony comes into play as well.
The Wellness Counselor position includes providing classroom presentations for prevention education, individual meetings with students for short-term intervention, wellness groups, drop-in sessions, psycho-education for substance policy violations, and maintaining connections with local community wellness resources. We have also been working with a small group of students we call the Wellness Leadership Council. This council will provide teen-specific insight into how we can make our wellness initiatives effective with Rice students, guide decisions around where wellness help is most needed in the student body, and provide leadership of specific wellness initiatives in the community.
This is just a beginning. My hope and belief is that every school K-12 and even post-secondary will have both formal education and programming to address wellness and stress management for the post-pandemic generations similar to the required physical education that has already been in place for decades.
The hope of all of this is that we are better equipped to help Rice students navigate the post-pandemic world more effectively and to be able to focus on classwork more effectively and make their learning more meaningful. Most importantly, we believe that by focusing on wellness we will be able to “guide our students toward the realization of their God-given potential”.