New collegiate recovery program comes to Delta
SAGINAW, Mich. (WNEM) - A new program at a local college is ensuring students have resources if they find themselves needing support for addiction recovery.
“I believe that this will be a huge benefit to the school itself,” said Kayla Howell, a second-year student at Delta College.
A new program with the purpose of being a place of help and understanding is starting on Delta College’s campus.
The collegiate recovery program will be in place to provide for those special students engaged in recovery from addiction and substance abuse.
“This is a free confidential service that is offered to students. So, they can walk in, they can call and make an appointment, they can email us to make an appointment, and really what we want to do first is we want to sit down and talk to them. We want to kind of find out, ‘Well, what does recovery look like for them?’” said Jessica Miller, a subject matter expert for the Collegiate Recovery and Wellness program at Delta.
Miller has been working with collegiate recovery programs for about seven years, and she said the uniqueness of the program’s new location gives a better representation of what some people go through on their journeys of recovery.
“When I think about where students are most likely to return to their education, it’s going to be at a community college. I might have a full-time job, I may have kids now, I may have a partner, I may have barriers that are going to keep me from being able to go to a university setting. There’s different application processes. It can be pretty intimidating,” Miller said.
Howell said she has seen how it can be hard for some students in the past.
“I had a bunch of classmates that would just open up in class and explain that they had issues themselves and they didn’t have help,” she said.
That help is now at Delta College, and it will come to any student who needs it.
The program is a first of its kind for the area schools.
“This is fairly new. So, a lot of the history of collegiate recovery programming is at universities, public schools, four-year universities, but to have a collegiate recovery program and building a community on a community college campus is huge,” Miller said.
Delta College’s new program is in the process of hiring a psych coordinator. The program will also offer a peer support group and one-on-one coaching.
Subscribe to the TV5 newsletter and receive the latest local news and weather straight to your email every day.
Copyright 2023 WNEM. All rights reserved.
