Eryn Brennan
In Motion Staff Writer
A new mentorship program that will bring homeless students together with faculty members is being implemented by Daytona State College for Spring B semester. The mentors will be someone that students facing homelessness can turn to when they are in need of guidance or help.
A retention sub-committee called Faculty Advising has the job of keeping students in college and getting them to graduation. Members consider what group of students may be in need of aid and from there decide how best to support them.
“We look at risk factors, things that cause students to drop out or fail their classes or get discouraged or frustrated. We come up with a plan every year of ‘what are some new initiatives that we can do to help the students?’ and that’s where this mentoring idea came about,” says English Professor and chair of the Faculty Advising Committee Richard Vollaro.
Along with providing a safe place for homeless students to go, the mentors will be armed with knowledge on resources at DSC that the mentees might not be aware of.
“All students really need that connection with someone now and then, but when you’re talking about people who are just struggling in ways that some of the other students aren’t, they probably just need some additional help and resources and that’s why we decided our pilot should focus on that group,” says Dr. Alycia Ehlert, a member of the Faculty Advising committee and the Vice President of the School of Arts and Sciences at DSC.
Homelessness among students at DSC is a serious and growing issue. According to Frank Gunshanan, an English professor at DSC who has been working with homeless students for about a year and a half, 82 students qualified for and accepted the Student Homeless Tuition Waiver in 2014 and 87 students accepted it in 2015.
“That’s just the students that self-identify, that said ‘I would like to partake in this.’ There are many, many students, we suspect, and the numbers confirm this, who don’t think of themselves as homeless, who maybe feel, ‘Well, I had to sleep in my car a couple of nights, but I’m not homeless,’” says Gunshanan.
Gunshanan explains that “there are many facets of homelessness.” When a student doesn’t know where they’re going to sleep that night, or next week, or next month, it can have a negative affect on their schoolwork.
“Homelessness is not just, ‘I’m sleeping on a park bench,’ or, ‘I’m eating out of a dumpster.’ The point is, financial crises impinge on academic success,” he says.
If a student feels they’re not yet experiencing homelessness, but may be approaching it, Gunshanan says that they are still “entitled to help.”
Last January, there was a Student Homeless Summit coordinated by Gunshanan to discuss how to help students who may be in need.
“We had a lot of people from the county and the state who gave us a broader picture of what homelessness is, what it looks like in Volusia County, what it looks like in Central Florida, what it looks like in Florida and the United States. So it’s kind of mirroring what the city of Daytona Beach and the county are doing right now, what is this problem and how do we solve it?”
This new mentorship program will aim to take away some of the extra burdens homeless students endure on top of the regular anxiety that comes with being a college student. Faculty and community members like Gunshanan who have experience working with the homeless will train the mentors. Vollaro says Gunshanan will be their “liaison for the community resources.”
According to Vollaro, the mentors will meet with their mentees throughout the semester to see how they are doing and if they need anything. Faculty mentors will also take notes during the sessions to document how things are going.
“Really, the job of the mentor is ‘What resource do you need?’ and ‘how can I help you with that resource?,’” explains Vollaro, “Hopefully it will be driven by the mentee, ‘what are you struggling with?’”
The committee is aiming for about 15 faculty members to mentor around 30 homeless students. If the program is successful, they hope to expand to more at-risk students along with homeless students in the future.
“We’re starting small so that we can kind of work the program out, see what works, what doesn’t work, see what the student experience is,” says Vollaro.