Slowing the Spread: How Kris Evans Led in Smith's COVID-19 Planning

Slowing the Spread: How Kris Evans Led in Smith's COVID-19 Planning by Megan Rubiner Zinn

Kris Evans, newly-appointed director of Smith College’s Schacht Center for Health and Wellness, had her first taste of COVID-19’s impact when a few of Smith’s undergraduate students returned in early 2020 concerned about their health.

Fortunately, none had contracted the virus. The next indication of the oncoming crisis came soon after, when study abroad programs began shutting down, sending students back to the United States. By spring break it was clear that a crisis was at hand. The college mobilized quickly to protect students’ health, and as the Center’s then interim director, Evans was thrust into the extraordinarily challenging position of managing key elements of this process.

Kris Evans led the development of the Smith College testing and contact tracing team.

Photo by Shana Sureck Photography

Evans, a doctoral student in the School for Social Work, began at the Schacht Center as the associate director for the Counseling Service in 2016, and had only taken on the role of interim director of the entire Schacht Center in November of 2019. Evans has also been an SSW adjunct professor since 2012, teaching a range of practice and theory courses and coordinating the comparative psychodynamic theory course.

As a doctoral student, Evans has focused on clinical training. “I am concerned about the medicalization and commodification of mental healthcare and how this has the potential to trickle down into clinical education, with treatment manuals and approaches that are often normed on dominant identities,” she explained. In her research, Evans hopes to explore how institutions can educate social workers to be critical thinkers and to embrace treatment models that serve a full range of human experiences and circumstances.

During the pandemic, Evans has had three primary roles. She is a planning consultant to the college at large, sitting on the COVID-19 Incident Response Team (CIRT) and chairing one of six health-working groups. Secondly, she has guided the massive transition of the Schacht Center to largely delivering remote health, wellness and counseling services to undergraduate students. Lastly, she has led the rapid development of the Schacht Center’s COVID testing and contact tracing team.

These responsibilities come with some expected, and some unexpected challenges. “I think the biggest challenges have been building entirely new infrastructures, in very, very short periods of time. I often say it was like building an entirely new Schacht Center,” Evans observed.

From the start, Evans and her team had to ensure that they were able to maintain Smith’s excellent student safety net remotely, finding new ways to connect students to their programming and services. They have needed to rethink how to remove barriers to student equity and inclusion, such as lack of proper technology, internet connection or quiet spaces to work or engage in therapy and programming, new family and economic responsibilities and time zone differences. They’ve also had to navigate licensing restrictions that make it difficult to provide services to students across state and country lines.

With a lot of ingenuity, Evans and the Schacht Center team have found ways to meet undergraduate students’ needs in spite of the challenges.

Evans was instrumental in working with Smith College administrators to respond to COVID-19.

Photo by Shana Sureck Photography

They offer telehealth medical care where licensing allows, and wellness programming, with a particular focus on wholeness and connection. They’ve maintained individual and group counseling and psychiatry care, and have added expanded coaching and affinity support groups. They are also engaging in bridging work—helping students get connected to health services in their home area to assure continuity of care. Finally, they are providing some in-person care to the small number of students on campus or living in the Northampton area.

Throughout the pandemic, Evans’ SSW training has been instrumental in informing her priorities and strategies, particularly social work’s biopsychosocial, social justice and trauma responsive perspectives.

Evans’ biopsychosocial perspective dovetails naturally with that of the Schacht Center, because it is fundamentally a biopsychosocial entity. “We have departments that intersect and overlap to meet all of those domains, so when we think about a COVID response, we’re naturally thinking about the economic, the social and the political challenges on top of the physical and mental health challenges,” she explained.

The Schacht Center’s commitment to racial justice is also paramount in supporting the wellbeing of Smith students. “Our social justice perspective allows us to pay attention to the issues that were taking lives before the pandemic, and could potentially take lives beyond the pandemic if we don’t continue to actively address them.” To that end, they have expanded programming informed by racial justice, including affinity groups for students with particular identities who may experience unique challenges during the pandemic, programming that supported students through the election cycle and support for students whose civil rights are threatened.

Finally, Evans and her staff have focused on creating a sense of safety for students in what feels like a fundamentally unsafe time, maintaining an awareness of the stages of trauma responsiveness— safety, processing and reconnecting— in everything they do.

Evans is not only grateful for the training the SSW has given her, but the people as well, as most counseling service staff members are SSW graduates. She’s been deeply impressed by the dedication, skills and creativity of these and all of her colleagues. “There’s such good work coming out of the Schacht center,” she said. “It’s all the folks who are boots on the ground, providing the therapy every day, showing up to provide the asymptomatic COVID tests or putting together a social media campaign to meet a unique need related to the pandemic.”

No matter what direction Evans takes when she leaves graduate school, she can already see how the pandemic will shape her future work. She’s had the unusual experience of simultaneously being a staff member, faculty member and student while managing an ongoing campus-wide emergency, and has seen how holding that middle space among multiple constituencies allows her to better serve her clients (in this case, students). “I think this middle space is actually a potential space, in that it gives me the ability to see many, many perspectives from a vantage point I wouldn’t otherwise have,” she observed. “I’m starting to really value the ways that—through relationship building and bringing all those voices to the table—we can have a better response to whatever challenges we face.” ◆