DePaulia
The
Volume #106 | Issue #9 | Nov. 8, 2021 | depauliaonline.com
Faculty primarily responsible for student mental health By Nadia Hernandez News Editor
PHOTO COURTESY OF IONE CASSENS
The family home of a Choix student, typical majority of homes in the area located near the L’Ecole de Choix campus.
Forgotten neighbors Haiti battles relevency on top of tragedies By Jana Kunz Contributing Writer
Between the earthquake on Aug. 14, the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse, a gang security crisis and a global pandemic, Haitian-born DePaul alum Paul Carisma said many “feel as though the country is cursed, that it can’t catch a break.” Carisma is aware that the place he grew up in and calls home is known to most of the world only from occasional news reports on the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. But with the country’s situation at a tipping point, more than 10,000 migrants brought their desperation to the United States’ door, according to the New York Times. The mass migration brought a lot of media attention to Haiti, but Carisma said these issues have been building up for a long time. When the pandemic hit in 2020, he said that it was overshadowed by the existing humanitarian issues, and ended up exacerbating them. “Corona is not the issue in Haiti,” he said. “While it is present, people don’t really think of it or care for it.” Laura Hartman, 58, is a professor emerita from the Department of Management & Entrepreneurship at DePaul. She went to Haiti in the late 2000s to represent the university in a microfinance project called Zafen to commemorate the death of St. Vincent de Paul, and she was struck by the gap in the quality of life and education levels that held many Haitian entrepreneurs
PHOTO COURTESY OF PAUL CARISMA’S FACEBOOK
Paul Carisma is a Haitian-born DePaul alum who has seen issues in Haiti far past Covid-19.
back from running an effective business. According to Partners in Literacy Haiti, the country’s literacy rate is 61 percent. “They had great ideas for small businesses and we could give them small loans, but many of them were illiterate, and their education was so poor that it was very sad,” Hartman said. “So I was really frustrated by this. In 2009, we began talking about building a school.” DePaul allowed her time to go to Haiti and follow through with her idea, and it opened on Oct. 17, 2011 as the School of Choice. It was modeled after Francis W.
Parker, a K-12 private school in Chicago where both Hartman and her daughter went to high school. “I thought, ‘Why should children in Haiti have any less quality of an education as my daughter or me?’ They deserve a high quality education, I don’t care where they were born or how much money or how little money they were born with,” she said. “And it’s called l’Ecole de Choix, the School of Choice, because education gives you choices, and choices give you dignity.”
See HAITI, page 10
Faculty members raised concerns over lack of university counseling services (UCS) in the Nov. 3 Faculty Council meeting as finals approached. Newsline published an article offering advice for faculty and staff on how to best support students during finals. Director of UCS Tow Yau gave more advice as well about how to interact with stressed out students. “Faculty are not mental health professionals, but they play an important role as the so-called gatekeeper for students, who often reach out to them first when they’re having problems,” Yau said in Newsline. “Our current generation of students is very open to sharing their mental health issues, and we want to be sure faculty have the tools and resources to respond.” UCS has not made any hires yet and is still relying on My Student Support System (SSP) for DePaul students. Professor Jay Baglia gave a presentation to the Faculty Council where he cited that faculty was not made aware of the lack of counselors at the beginning of the academic year. “There was no heads up -- not from the office of marketing and communications or anyone else -- at the beginning of the fall,” Baglia said in his presentation at the meeting. “No references to this considerable alteration at convocation or during the state of the university presentation.” Baglia also addressed Newsline’s article at the meeting where he said that he “facepalmed” at the administration’s response. He had heard rumors from students about the lack of counseling services. Once confirmed, Baglia started hearing student testimonies about My SSP. “Students confirm that their experience with My SSP was anything but ideal,” he said. “There are certainly uses for an app like My SSP as a stop gap as that would allow the university to offer some kind of counseling services for students who live out of state.You can’t provide counseling to a student who’s not in the state. So there are uses for an app but as far as I know, there’s not many examples of a university who’s gone almost exclusively to the app.” Other members mentioned how Loyola University is currency fully staffed with nurses, social workers, psychologists and a therapy dog. Vice President of Student Affairs Gene Zdziarski, who was in attendance at the Nov. 3 meeting, explained many factors that contributed to the current
See COUNSELING, page 5