How will colleges recover from the coronavirus pandemic? Campuses that survived disasters such as fires, hurricanes and floods offer clues.
fell to less than half
University officials often think of bouncing back from a disaster like the Camp fire in terms of weeks or months, Megan Kurtz, a community liaison at Chico State, said. In reality, she said, “this is a 15- or 20-year recovery.”Just over a year after the fire, oak trees and grass have again turned the hill behind Butte College’s main campus, once barren and sooty, a healthy green.
The college has filled a position for a full-time mental health counselor and plans to hire a second one soon. While many campus health centers focus on short-term counseling, Butte is experimenting with a 12-week program designed to address post-traumatic stress disorder., the semester the Tubbs fire closed the campus for a week; the university called in therapists from other Cal State campuses to help.
“One of the things that we learned is to find a way to help faculty and staff immediately, and a very tangible way to do that is to make sure that they continue to get paid,” she said. “These are often things that go on the back burner,” she said. “Now people understand why we need to make time to do it.”Colleges and universities are also adapting their curricula to the new normal, developing training programs that can provide workers to help with rebuilding — and jobs for disaster survivors. Butte College trained 2,000 debris removal workers, Yaqub said, many of whom had lost their jobs and homes in the fires.
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