Humber’s counselling services are trying to become more accessible for students in order to make their services more effective.
All Humber College and University of Guelph-Humber students are able to access different services made available by the Student Wellness and Accessibility Centre (SWAC). SWAC offers health services, accessible learning and counselling services.
SWAC is currently in the process of hiring two more counsellors to bring the total number of staff to 13 from 11. They will try to meet the counselling needs of Humber College, which reported 33,000 full-time students and 23,000 part-time and continuing education students enrolled in 2022.
Miriam Novick, chief steward of Humber faculty Local 562, said whether the increase in counsellors will prove to be beneficial remains to be seen.
Milos Vasic, president of OPSEU Local 562 representing Humber’s faculty, said new counsellors needed to be hired full-time following issues involving the administration.
“So in a nutshell, the colleges wanted very vague, general definitions of what counsellors do because then it would have been easier to contract it out, whereas the union was asking for more specific descriptions of the job that would have made it harder for the colleges to basically contract it out,” he said.
Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, there wasn’t an option for students to book an appointment with a counsellor online. Students now have a choice between a virtual or in-person session as classes return to campus.
In addition, SWAC uses a same-day, next-day appointment system. This means that despite working on an appointment based schedule there’s always room for students who may book last-minute appointments if there are any cancellations.
“Even if an appointment is in person, to have the flexibility of calling the counsellor or reaching out to the counsellor to say, ‘Hey, can I flip to online?’ having that flexibility, I think, is really important for our learners,” said Leah State, the director of Student Well-Being.
“I think people want options. It’s not that they want in person or they want virtual, they want to know they can access what they need when they need,” she said.
According to SWAC’s website, current operating hours are from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. The hours are meant to be made so students are able to access counselling during the time most people have classes but this isn’t always the case.
Miriam Novick, the chief steward of Local 562, said that realistically, most students aren’t able to see a counsellor due to prior commitments with school, jobs and taking care of their families.
She said Humber having flexibility on appointment types is an asset, but if students aren’t able to make their appointments due to prior commitments there needs to be an adjustment made to align more with a Humber student’s typical schedule.
“We need to be thinking about what people, again, actually need, what students need, not what a metric sheet says, but what a student says when they say, ‘I cannot get an appointment or here are the barriers to me getting an appointment,’ she said.
“That needs to matter, at least as much as what an algorithm says about availability,” Novick said.