 Hi, good midday to you from Fairfield University. My name is Susan Burge, and I'm the Assistant Director of, I'm the Assistant Vice President at Fairfield University, and I'm also the Director of Counseling and Psychological Services. With me today is Lisa Arnold, and she will introduce herself. Good afternoon. I am the clinical coordinator of the Collegiate Recovery Program. I also do some psychotherapy in counseling and psychological services, and I also conduct all of the substance abuse assessments on campus. So Lisa and I are here today to talk to you, the parents of students coming to Fairfield University, about the issues of alcohol and drugs in terms of our campus culture. We have both been working at Fairfield University for a very long time and have a great deal of experience. And what students encounter when they come to university vis-a-vis trying, experimentation, and using alcohol and drugs. What we want to do is give you a real sense of the range of students. We have some students in Fairfield University who choose not to use alcohol, not to drink, and nor do they choose to take any drugs. That's one group, one population. That population, until they find one another, may feel somewhat left out and a little bit, it may be a little bit more of an adjustment for them coming to university because they're not participating in some of the social activities that might involve alcohol and drug use. So we are particularly mindful of them. There's a lot of programming and a lot of opportunities to get those folks together who are like-minded in terms of their choices. I would say the bulk of students coming to Fairfield University are going to, if they haven't already, experiment at least with drinking. We are in New England University and we will talk to you later about our trends and it just is common for our area of the country. The use is a little bit greater with alcohol and with drugs. So there are those that are going to experiment. There are those that are going to use. There are those that are going to, their alcohol and maybe drug use will be around their socialization. So that's one group. We tend to see a greater use. It's called the freshman effect when they first get here and Lisa will talk to you about what drives some of that. And then after that, it can taper down. So that's kind of in terms of a graph. That's where a lot of our students are. They're going to experiment and then they're going to use alcohol or drugs more for socialization. Beyond that, there are some students who develop abuse. They're using it maybe to self-medicate anxiety. There's some dependency issues that may come along and those students, those are the ones that are probably going to experience the negative effects of alcohol drug use that we're going to talk to you about today. Continuing on, on that spectrum, we have a number of students at Fairfield University who have made choices to stop their drinking drug use, they've entered treatment facilities, and now they are part of our Collegiate Recovery Program. So we have a full spectrum at Fairfield University of how we address alcohol and drugs. We are very upfront with this. We are not an institution that sweeps it under the rug. We feel we have a responsibility to be forthright with our students and with our parents that we take this issue very, very seriously. And importantly, we look to partner with you so that our students have the full university experience. They accomplish their personal and their academic goals and that alcohol and drug use does not interfere with those goals and importantly with their well-being. It is probably the number one issue on colleges and universities that impacts the functioning and well-being of college students. So that's the backdrop of what you, you will hear us talk about today and we're delighted that you're interested in that you care enough to be present with us today. So as I mentioned before, I conduct all of the substance abuse assessments on campus. One of the phenomenons that I see occur within approximately the first six weeks of the freshman college experience can be called the freshman effect. It's also called the red zone and it's a period of time of transition and adjustment for freshmen who are learning their place socially, academically and sometimes very challenged by fitting in. And in the process of learning and in understanding what that transition means to them is the use of alcohol and drugs in parties, in social situations. I often see students who engage in some risky behaviors that are uncharacteristic to their nature and oftentimes parents and students themselves might be surprised by their use of alcohol or drugs or perhaps their impulsivity. And when students come in for a substance abuse assessment I might have a conversation with them about how the effects of the alcohol or drugs are affecting their ability to be social or how their sociability is affected by their use of alcohol or drugs. Homesickness often plays a large role in this where they're unsure of themselves, of who they are, of how to fit in and they'll use alcohol and drugs in a way that they might not have done in the past and the good news is they might not do in the future. And that's why we've coined that term because it's really a trial and error period for students in the first six weeks who are doing a lot of experimentation oftentimes with alcohol and drugs and if they are sent to me to have that conversation we can sort out what those feelings are and how that culminates for them in their relationship with alcohol and drugs on campus. Lisa let's talk a little bit about why students, why young men and women choose to drink and use drugs not only on a college campus when they're certainly home for breaks and out and about with their friends. What are some reasons? So like I was saying before with breaking the ice which is the first one I have that conversation often with students who say, I'm not sure, I understand what it means to be a freshman socially, where do I go and what do I do? And if there's alcohol involved they often use that as a social lubricant and that goes hand in hand with enhancing social activities and also in terms of giving students something to do I often like to reiterate with students that in the first couple weeks of their college experience there will be a club and activity fair for them to find other activities to do and how to get involved. Freshmen often come to us after spending their senior year and years before that very involved in their high school experience so it's understandable that when they get here and they don't have a full plate of activities and a wide range of things to do yet that they kinda get that tunnel vision and they follow the crowd and find that if there's nothing else to do in that moment then they'll turn to alcohol and drugs because that due to close proximity their friends are doing it and it's difficult for them to figure out what to do next and that goes also for facilitating connections with peers at a social level, at an intimate level whether that be emotional or sexual we find that students are oftentimes confused when they first get to school and that's how alcohol can have a negative effect on that initial experience. Moving forward, we wanna give you a sense of what we're seeing, again it's not specifically unique to Fairfield University but that's what we know and we wanna tell you what we are encountering in terms of students using alcohol and drugs. The drug of choice meaning the most prevalent drug and we consider alcohol a mood altering drug if you will is alcohol. The students tend to drink a lot of beer but what we've seen over the course of I'd say five, six, seven, eight years is an increase in the amount of students drinking shots and so what they're doing is they're pre-gaming they're getting together before a campus event they're getting together before they go out to maybe an activity, a concert, a party and they're really drinking a number of shots now you can imagine if you're drinking shots in rapid fire you're not getting a sense of it's not being metabolized and importantly they're not getting a sense of how it's impacting them so they might be putting down six or seven shots that's a lot of alcohol and when it finally gets into their system they're collapsed and it's not, unfortunately it's not unusual in the first couple of weeks that especially our freshmen are found passed out it all of a sudden hits them and they can truly not function so that's a concern is the amount of alcohol I think it's easier for them to get it into the residence halls if they buy some vodka if they buy some hard liquor they think they can get it in, sneak it in and then they can have these little gatherings in their room and again front load pre game with shots so that's really problematic we do a lot of education, work with them and try to help them understand how to pace yourself how to drink a lot of water, stay hydrated I mean we're certainly trying to educate again to mitigate any kind of negative outcome from this we are seeing a lot of marijuana a lot more than we had let's say 10 years ago 15 years ago, the pot seems to be back they most of them have been using it in high school they bring it along, they have their supply their connection, certainly we do uphold state of Connecticut law, we'll talk to you more about that marijuana is an infraction, there are consequences legally and certainly within the university behavior code of conduct more and more and more students are coming to universities having been prescribed Adderall, maybe Ritalin maybe Concerta for ADD or ADHD what happens when they get to college is that if they're not locking up their medication, their prescriptions sometimes students see it, take it, it can be stolen additionally it is not uncommon for students to share it one of the things that we were aware of is that when students are going to drink for long periods of time they might want to get a hold of some Adderall or some Ritalin as a stimulant and it offsets kind of that sloppy, droopy, pass outy, drunk feeling it actually keeps them high on alcohol longer without the depressive symptoms but a very bad mix as you can imagine we're mixing a depressant, the alcohol with a stimulant, the Adderall or the Ritalin certainly on campus and again this is not specific to Fairfield University we have students who are using cocaine we have students using pain medications oftentimes maybe they are prescribed whether for an injury or whether for having their wisdom teeth out it may start with a legitimate prescription from a doctor's office and then they develop some dependency it feels good, it can feel kind of euphoric it can help them feel less anxious and so they want to continue it maybe with their Vicodin, maybe their Percocet maybe their RoxySets but there's also a lot of street use in terms of not a lot in perspective there are students that do use opiates that they buy from one another or get from a dealer that's just this age group I'm sure you've all heard there is an epidemic of opiate use and opiate use includes heroin Lisa and I have worked very closely to build a reputation of a safe place and so we have students who are struggling with their drug use maybe they're actually beginning withdrawal symptoms we are safe, we are going to get them the help that they need without the judgment we're going to ideally involve the family and get them the level of care they need so believe it or not a lot of students do approach Lisa and I for that kind of help and support when they realize that their drug use or their alcohol use has rendered their lives unmanageable or again is really impacting their quality of life what we see in terms of Molly and Ecstasy occasionally there's concerts not only on campus but other local area universities and colleges have concerts that are kind of techno or rave and that's where we see an increase in Molly and Ecstasy what we do is again trying to meet this head on we work with public safety and make sure that they are prepared for this kind of drug looking for any kind of symptom any kind of concern medically they're looking at certain behaviors which we are keenly aware of get manifested with this kind of use we also have a health center on campus students with concerns are not feeling well as a result of alcohol and drugs can go there however it's only open from 8 in the morning to 8 at night so they can come to counseling, health and public safety can be involved to make sure that they're safe and they get the treatment that they need last year we had 139 students who were charged with violating the university's policy on illegal drug use that might be possession that might be distribution and that might be use Lisa, that number has changed I think Right, last year it was 103 students when we sat in these seats that were charged with violating the university's policy and this year we are up to 139 so it's definitely something that needs to be addressed in a very non-judgmental way that's why we do have the reputation of being very non-judgmental when students come in it sounds so official to have a substance abuse assessment all that is is a conversation that I have with students about their relationship with alcohol and drugs whether that be voluntary or if that is handed down as something that was sanctioned by the Dean of Students Office after a student is written up for an incident some of the things that Susan mentioned before are very important because mixing drugs and alcohol can be potentially very dangerous and the piggyback effect which Susan was describing before as front loading your evening with shots before you go out for the night that can be very dangerous and there's a lot of reasons why students do that and when I have that conversation with students it really uncovers some of what's going on why do you feel the need to do that sometimes they don't know if they'll find alcohol at certain parties whatever the reason might be because I asked them why is it important for you to do that and what their goal is is to have a nice even keel of a buzz throughout the night so it's nice to throw in some psycho-educational information about front loading your night with shots isn't going to produce a linear effect it will produce a bell curve effect where someone will get very very euphoric and buzzed and then it's a slippery slope down where the central nervous system depressant effect of alcohol kicks in and students will begin to black out and engaging activities that they might not remember or that are very uncharacteristic for them if you combine that with other substances such as Adderall which is a stimulant it allows someone to drink a lot more alcohol without blacking out and the dangerous and sometimes fatal effect of that is that students will poison themselves with alcohol because the stimulant keeps them awake where if they hadn't taken another substance they might have been able to slow down or be able to stop drinking before that happens and the same for cocaine many students are not aware of the effects of malian ecstasy how they immediately begin to dehydrate your system it's very important to stay hydrated at all times whether you're drinking or using other substances and having this conversation with students in a very non-judgmental way offers them information and about how to prevent things from happening that will interfere with their ability to remain productive as a student here and to stay safe and to keep each other safe which is our goal sharing medications is extremely dangerous so it's important because so many more students are coming onto campus with prescription medication to lock up your medication to be mindful of where you're keeping it and to inform your son or daughter that if you take someone else's medication it potentially will not produce the same effect for your son or daughter as it would have for the person prescribed the number one reason for that is because they don't weigh the same they're not the same gender they don't have the same tolerance so it's important for myself and also for you to have these conversations to prevent situations from happening you raise a good point Lisa too that we have a number of students more and more each year coming to the university who have been under the care of a psychiatrist or their primary care doctor and have been prescribed medication for anxiety, depression maybe bipolar disorder and that mix of drugs really it's so important that they don't mix it with alcohol because again many of them are antidepressants and then the alcohol is a depressant so it not only is diluting the effects of the medication they're taking to feel better but importantly it's a dangerous mix we have some students who also use and it's very addictive benzodiazepines and these are like clonopin, Xanax and it's really dangerous what we really try to message and talk to our students about is that that is probably the most dangerous to mix alcohol and something that's more sedative and anti-anxiety medication because they don't understand the effects and that can really not only quiet the respirations the brain stops receiving messages to breathe and that can be fatal so we really again we're trying to get a lot of this information out to students we're trying to have them make informed choices so we take our role very responsible in getting them the information they need to get Lisa's going to tell you a little bit about I reference that the use of alcohol and drugs at Fairfield U when we do these national surveys we come out just a tad ahead of our peer institutions and the slide that you're seeing now demonstrates that Lisa, how do you interpret that? So we, as you were mentioning before Susan we do have different kind of caliber of drinkers on campus and you have, we have some high risk drinkers we have some students who drink recreationally and then we have students who don't drink at all on campus and so every year I'm noticing that the trend for the high risk drinkers tends to creep up a little bit higher and the light or the moderate drinkers might creep up a little bit higher due to the influence of other students there's a correlation to anxiety and depression and you know just self medicating those feelings or not knowing who to turn to so for Fairfield some high risk drinkers I think that falls into the problematic rate of about 9% and if we're lucky we get to see a lot of those students in counseling either they filter through from incidents that are happening on campus or in the hope that they recognize that they need some help they might come to us and have a conversation. Again not to be really heavy and to alarm you but again to be forthright and to work with you in terms of doing the best thing we can for our students and your sons and daughters we do wanna talk to you about the consequences and this is certainly what keeps Lisa and I and many people at the university up at night to tell you the truth. Worst case scenario is losing a student to their alcohol or their drug use and related unintentional injuries including a motor vehicle accident. We also see an increase I would say in general the assaults that we see at Fairfield University are very very infrequently however usually they've been drinking and so their judgment is impaired tend to be more aggressive and certainly the impulsivity is greater. If they weren't drinking they might have been able to walk away they might have been able to work it out verbally but again with alcohol fueled anger it can result in physical injury. I would say about 99% of the sexual assaults that we deal with at Fairfield University have an alcohol component. Again it is young men and women it's not that we are blaming the alcohol it's not a causal correlation but it's a factor and it is very difficult for these students to try to recall what happened to try to understand actions that they took behaviors they engaged in when there is drinking and there might be some blackout or brownout so it could certainly impair his judgment as you know. Academic problems, so many of the students who begin to get remember on that spectrum where it begins to be more than use and maybe into abuse meaning how often they're drinking the frequency and the amount how much they're drinking they're gonna be the students who invariably are going to miss a class in the morning they're hung over they don't feel well maybe they're not gonna go to the late afternoon class because there's a party they might do poorly on exams they might miss deadlines it can impact their academics and we have I have encountered many parents over the course of I've been here 20 years say to their son or daughter I'm not paying for this I am paying for you to get a good education and the parent can have an awful lot of leverage around re-tooling the direction the goals that the student is choosing why they are here at Fairfield University. Other consequences, suicide attempts it is not uncommon that we have somebody who because they get very sad they've been drinking maybe there's a breakup involved or something's going on at home and again that impulsivity that sense of fleeting despair and they think to themselves I can't do this anymore I don't wanna be here anymore and they take their bottle of pills or whatever method they choose to use and the reality is they didn't mean to end their life they didn't even mean to attempt to end their life it was reacting to a compromised cognition and impairment in their judgment you can imagine we're involved in that up in counseling and we go to the hospital with them and many many times the next morning they will say I didn't mean for that I was just so upset so we have to be mindful of that. Injuries, I remember last year we had students who you can imagine they fell they hit their head on the bed they fell off the bed again this was as a result of them drinking too much or maybe using drugs. Unsafe sex again the impaired judgment and the impulsivity come into play driving under the influence as you can imagine not only the state of Connecticut but Fairfield University we take these things very very seriously again this is safety and well-being this is beyond experimentation this is beyond just trying this is making really poor judgments and what we look at is risky behavior risky behavior means you are risking your health and well-being and perhaps that of another. Property damage, vandalism you can imagine a big party or a group going back to the bathroom and what might happen. At Fairfield University we have I forget the exact number but a significant number of surveillance cameras now these cameras are not violating students' privacy and by that I mean they're not in their rooms and they are not in the bathrooms but I believe that every hallway in a residence hall has surveillance cameras and we are monitoring not me not Lisa but public safety is monitoring who is staggering if there was an alleged allegation or a report of sexual assault who was coming out of the room. The university really has excellent ability to monitor but they can't do every hall 24-7 but there is surveillance so when needed of course as you can imagine we involve the Fairfield Police Department with whom we work very closely on these matters. The only other thing I'd like to mention about that is that in that very last paragraph with other consequences I'm looking at what drives a lot of those behaviors and a lot of times it's the impulsivity and it's the lack of maturity but if you take alcohol and you add that to the equation oftentimes the first thing that you lose when you drink alcohol is your ability to make good judgment and your ability to reason and your frontal lobe is not fully developed until you're 25 years old if you combine that with the use of alcohol which developmentally stunts that growth I have students sitting in my office if they're lucky enough to be there the next day after some of those attempted suicide attempts or things that have happened falling out of cars or making a bad decision sexually they not only wouldn't have made that decision but oftentimes don't even remember making that decision or remember the action itself and I think that's really the most harmful thing that we try to prevent students from happening and this is why we do so much psycho-ed about the effects of alcohol and blacking out and that point of no return and try to educate students before they reach that point and before these consequences take hold. We wanna talk to you a little bit about our philosophy and it's a harm reduction approach. Now you might think to yourself, well why don't you just abide by Connecticut law and there should be no drinking allowed by any member of this community, campus community who are 21 years or younger and if we did do that, if we did the old model of just say no, they are only going to go more and more stealth, they are going to be more and more sneaky and our overarching goal of their health, their safety, their wellbeing, we will have jeopardized. So we can be draconian in our approach or we can engage them and try to help them develop into responsible, accountable adults and so most colleges and universities take this approach, meeting them where they're at, working with the individual, the emerging adult to have them make healthier choices so this is not that we do not recognize and honor state law, indeed we do, but they are here to learn this is an educational institution and we want this to be an educational process for them to make the better decisions. Lisa's gonna talk a little bit about how harm reduction plays out on this campus community and her style and her interventions. So the premise behind harm reduction is really meeting a student where they're at. Historically and what I mean by that is years before I came to the university, the philosophy might be when a student gets into trouble are you 21 and the student says no, well don't drink until you are and what that leads to is, as Susan was saying, a lot of deception. So my approach is a bit different from that in the sense that when students come in if there's an understanding between us that it might be unsafe and illegal that you are drinking under the age of 21, how can we manage this and how can we work on it if it does tend to get problematic for you? Oftentimes students come to my office not by their own will but because they were brought in by someone who was concerned. They may have been written up by the dean's office, there might be a coach who's concerned or a professor, I might get a phone call from a parent. So my hook in getting a student to become more intrinsically motivated to be there is to gauge my questions in such a manner. So if a student comes in and says, well so and so said that I had to be here to talk about my drinking, I come from the approach of let's pretend for a second that you're here for yourself. Is there something that you would like to work on? If there's anything that you might be able to change about your alcohol use or your drug use that would improve the quality of your life, what might that be? And so when a student establishes their own goals and a better understanding of themselves, they're more motivated to sit in my office and to explore those things with me. If I came from that draconian approach, they would probably come to my office and be very dishonest. If they knew that I would judge them for drinking or using substances under the age of 21, it would be quite a different conversation. So it's very important that I make that connection and build empathy toward that student and their situation in order to understand where they're coming from. This is not only that we're trying to engage and deliver best practices in terms of our approach to alcohol and drugs at Fairfield U, but it's more than that. Everything that we do here, we very much are mindful and upholding our Jesuit values. And one of the miscure personalities, I'm sure you heard about it at orientation or in literature, and it's about caring for the whole person. So certainly they're coming to Fairfield University for an education, but so much more is going on outside of the classroom. And we see that as an important learning experience. So it's educational in some ways in terms of personal growth, making healthier choices, gaining insight about self, being part of a community as classroom learning. We're very conscientious about talking to our students about their health, their wellbeing, again, making those healthier choices with regard to alcohol and drug use. What we've initiated and we're very, very incorporated and embedded in our welcoming of new students, our introduction, our orientation to their Fairfield experience is the bystander approach. Oftentimes people think of this as around sexual assault. In other words, if there's a way that you can help interfere with a possible sexual assault, but we also incorporate that around alcohol and drinking. If you see somebody isn't doing well, if you see somebody who's gonna leave a party and they're unsteady, we're really trying to educate, take care of one another. They tend to come into university with this, I think it's kind of left over from elementary school and middle school and high school with this fear of getting in trouble. And we're trying to say to them, wait, wait, wait, you're a young adult now, you're living independently. Rather than coming from that fear, can you shift and adopt doing the right thing? Not only doing the right thing for you, but doing the right thing for your friend or maybe somebody you don't know who needs your help. So we're really trying to build a sense of community where they take care of each other. There's not public safety walking around residence halls. Lisa and I and our clinical staff are not on campus unless there's an emergency over the weekend. So we need the students to act in terms of Jesuit values, but in terms of being responsible adults, that's what we do. We take care of each other and we don't worry about getting in trouble. The university has built in amnesty policies, factors that all in and really, we hope that they incorporate those values of doing the right thing. There are so many activities at Fairfield University that don't involve alcohol and we're very mindful of that and we encourage that. But we're also aware that some of the students who are going to those activities, again like Lisa and I have been talking about, may use, may drink beforehand and may begin to feel the effects while they're using it. But please, what we want you to do is work with us in developing a sense of responsibility, a sense of being a good member of a community and taking care of each other with your sons and daughters. We have so many resources at Fairfield University, so I'm just telling you there's so many activities, non-alcoholic, there's student engagement, FYE, which is their first year experience, residence life. I mean, there's more to do here than you can imagine. But we have great resources and so we want you to know as parents if your students are concerned, if they're struggling, I don't know if I'm fitting in, I'm worried about this issue for myself, I'm worried about somewhere else, a really safe, confidential, private, free place to go is up to counseling and psychological services. We are up near the health center in Dolan. Dolan's also a residence hall for upperclassmen and it's on the north side of campus. Student health center is great, these are APRNs and nurses and an MD who comes in a couple of times a week. Great resources. Dean of Students' Office, that's kind of like a go-to. If you have questions that you just don't know what department to go to, I would say called Office of the Dean of Students and they're gonna get you the answer or refer you to the right office. Residence life has all these RAs and new student leaders. They're in training this week, it's more like a bootcamp. They're learning how to handle all sorts of transition issues, student issues and facilitate a really healthy, good transition adjustment to Fairfield University. We have just a wonderful campus ministry group of people. They do pastoral counseling as well as just provide so many opportunities for students to get involved with service work and to build communities of care and community of outreach and doing for others. And public safety, that is your go-to with high level concerns. If you're concerned about your son or daughter, if it's urgent, you will call the Office of Public Safety. And again, they will either put you in touch with another office or appropriate or they will deal with your concerns at that point. Sometimes we do have parents, their son or daughter didn't sound good, they weren't responsive, they were concerned that they made statements, it didn't sound like them. That's a call to public safety and they're going to involve myself and Lisa or whomever staff is working with me at that time. Yeah, I'm looking at that list Susan and I'm noticing now more than ever is that our relationships with various departments, all of those listed, has become more collaborative over the years. These departments along with counseling and psychological services, we attend trainings together and we communicate in a very open manner with the exception of the confidentiality of what happens in counseling. And the ripple effect of that I feel is good service to our students in that if we need help quickly, we can call public safety. If we need help from campus ministry, they're right there for us. We can help settle housing issues with Res Life and I really, we pride ourselves on our relationships with the other departments on campus. Yeah, we've kind of created a, what we think is a pretty effective safety net and indeed that may involve parents expressing their concern so that we can be mindful and can be helpful if you're worried about your son or your daughter. Again, let's just review kind of the range of Fairfield University of what we're doing. So we're doing everything I've talked a lot today about we're doing education, we're trying to get all this information out to our students about again, use, abuse, healthy choices, resources on campus. Before they even come here, they've done alcohol, EDU, that's designed to front load, give them some good information. Their orientation has all the alcohol and drug and resources information. They have a component of their first year experience program. We bring in speakers, Lisa's out in the community, down in the campus center. She's also in the residence halls doing a lot of education. We think of education as hopefully prevention, so education and prevention activities. So we've got a lot going on and our jewel are kind of as I said to you at the other end of this spectrum for those men and women who have chosen abstinence and who by their own admission cannot drink and drug and choose to be in recovery. Lisa and I have created a program that I want Lisa to give you a little sense of what that looks like. So here at Fairfield University, we have the Collegiate Recovery Program. It is the only residential recovery offered in the state of Connecticut at any university. And this year, we had the honor of opening our second recovery home. So what this means is that we have the ability to house up to 10 students who are committed to their recovery. And when they come to us, they come with a period of sobriety before they have arrived on campus and they have a package of activities that they are already engaged in, such as 12-step recovery service work and which includes serving others and doing volunteer work. And what these students do is they really heighten the awareness for other students on campus that sobriety on campus is possible. And that these students can be committed to it. They can live a full life and they can learn to balance their academics with their ability to be sober. Recently, we opened up our recovery group to all students on campus who are interested in being sober. And what that did was that included all of our residential students who are in the collegiate recovery program as well as anyone else on campus who would like to come and listen to what that experience is like. It created the largest group that we've ever had on campus, which included 19 students who were either fully committed to recovery or strongly contemplating that they were ready to be sober. And I think that's a huge step in the right direction for creating a healthier culture on this campus. That's a good point about the culture. It's so nice to be able to have our students be so mindful that there are a group of students in recovery and they are optimizing their college experience without mood altering substances and doing really well. And we have great, great success stories. We're just really proud of that program. Again, just to review, I've talked to you about this but we have such a range including the individual group counseling, AA meetings on campus, all the alternative alcohol-free programming. We also have two psychiatrists coming onto campus every week as well as a psychiatric APRN. So we kind of have referenced some students who are using and abusing alcohol and drugs to self-medicate their anxiety or depression maybe. If we can get them into counseling, we can really address that through therapy as well as medication management with prescription medication prescribed by psychiatry. So in conclusion, here's what we want to put forth to you. We do take our jobs, our role at Fairfield University in terms of creating a healthy environment and facilitating our students making healthier choices in terms of their safety and well-being. But we need your partnership. We need, we ask that you talk to your sons and daughters before this weekend about substances, about alcohol use, about drug use, anything that you want to relay that we've talked about, any strategies that you want to give. As Lisa said, your best bet on this is to approach it in a non-judgemental, mental, informational conversation. They're more likely to come back to you if you're not engaging in finger wagging and don't even think about doing this or that because then they're not going to come back to you. So you want to have the conversation with the end goal of that you've opened the lines of communication about these issues with your son and daughter. We ask that you work with us in creating natural consequences. If your son or daughter is written up, if they are involved with the Dean of Students, if they are given an infraction, if they are required to see Lisa for a substance abuse assessment, if there is a consequence, we ask you to allow them and work with us because that's the learning opportunity. Some parents want to prevent the natural consequences, not have the student think that they're in trouble, I don't want to get in trouble. Please work with us to see it as an educational, as an opportunity to gain insight about yourself, to learn about your relationship for alcohol and drugs and to improve, to go on. So we do ask you to work with us on that. Allowing them to learn from their experience, you know that's the best way to learn. And if we jipped them of that by trying to rescue them, we jipped them of that experience. There was an email from our Dean of Students that went to you about talking to your sons and daughters about it's like a parent guide. Take a few minutes and look through it. You might get some strategies about how to have that conversation. But again, we do encourage you to talk with them before we get them and then we'll do the best to provide them with all the services that we provide in that big range. So we thank you for joining us. This is going to be exciting. You saw the numbers. It is not everybody at Fairfield U is drinking and taking drugs. It is not that. But we do have a population of students that like to party. They like to socialize and that can translate into very high risk behavior. And that's what we're addressing today. We want to open this up to questions for Lisa and I. We're eager to hear any concerns or provide you with information that you might like to have. So the first question we received, which I believe is in regard to the slide with the bar graphs of our high risk drinkers. And the question is why is it that Fairfield has a higher high risk drinking average than in comparison to the other areas on the charts? Yeah, what they did was they were looking at peer institutions. What we have learned in terms of data that's been collected is that New England, again our area, our geographic area has a little bit higher use. We're also aware that our students, many of them have come from private schools or they've come from public schools where they had means and access. Means is maybe they had cars that they could get access and money to alcohol and drugs. They may have had parents who had, who left them to go on vacation, trusted them with the house. They may have had second homes. Some of it, as a matter of fact, does have to do with income and their background and whether or not they had the opportunity to develop these patterns, to develop a little tolerance and develop the behaviors in high school, wouldn't you say? Absolutely. And another important thing to mention about our students in recovery, oftentimes, and I want to answer this question for anyone who might have it because people often do, we have a population of students who are in recovery and that's not by virtue because our numbers are so much higher statistically for alcohol and drug use than other colleges or universities. I think that we've tried to eradicate a lot of the social stigma by offering services like Collegiate Recovery Program and most of my students, but particularly who are residents in our housing for Collegiate Recovery, have actually transferred from other schools and I think what sets us apart from other schools also is that we're not afraid to address the issue and so we are one of 250 Collegiate Recovery Programs around the country which offers this kind of second chance for students who might not fit in anymore on a campus where they don't offer special services for students who are committed to staying sober. Great, the second question was will we be notified if our student violates any alcohol or drug policy on campus? Yes, let me just back up. If your son or daughter needs to be transported via ambulance to a local hospital because public safety, who are all EMTs has determined that they need medical attention, you will be called that night. You will be called I believe by an area coordinator in residence life. So you will be informed if your son and daughter is going to a hospital. Additionally under FERPA, the Family Education Rights Act, you will be notified by the Dean of Students Office if your son or daughter has violated policy at the university involving alcohol and drugs. That is actually one of the exceptions to FERPA and we do take advantage of that. Again, looking for your partnership we feel it's important that you know that. Perfect, the third question we have is if a student is at a party and wishes to leave but feels concerned about walking alone to their dorm due to intoxication of others, can they contact public safety? Yes, and they are encouraged to do so. There's a couple things that they can do by all means call public safety. One of the things when the students come onto campus we ask them to program in public safety's telephone number so that they have it in their contacts. We're also getting a new app. It's called emergency and not only will students have it, it's an app on their cell phone, but if they push it, it goes to public safety and it activates the camera aspect of the cell phone as well as the audio aspect of the cell phone as well as the GPS. So public safety will know where that individual is and can respond and can actually see and hear what's going on. So if they're having a really hard time, they were going to be training them to do that. They can also call for an escort it's called and public safety will come up and walk them back. And also if they can say I'm really concerned about this person, there's a way around amnesty that we would rather, again I taught you earlier about it could save somebody's life. Who cares about getting them in trouble? We certainly don't wanna find them the next day. So we really do encourage, speak up for, for other members of your community. Great and the last question we have is, do you have Greek life on campus that tends to play a big role in college drinking? We don't, Fairfield University does not have Greek life. What we do have that kind of mimics it a little bit is we have a community at Fairfield Beach. It's about a mile, maybe a mile and a half from our campus. It's a gorgeous beach on Long Island Sound. And I would say a large number of our senior class live down there. What they do is they rent beach houses from, as you can imagine the landlord, the owner of the houses that maybe use it in the summer, they rent it out to Fairfield youth students, some Sacred Heart students as well. It is, as you can imagine, independent living. It's fairly unsupervised. These are men and women who are typically 21 years old. And what happens is that when the freshmen get onto campus, they hear about, oh, there's gonna be a big party at the beach, and all of a sudden the taxis come on, the ubers come on, and the freshmen are trying to get down to the beach to break in, bust in, crash one of these big, which they think, and they probably are fun parties, but we really discourage that. When they get down there, the seniors do not want the freshmen, do not want the sophomores down in their beach house because they will be held responsible. And that's by Fairfield Police Department. So they're gonna, the freshmen get down there, and they're not gonna be welcome. So we try to get that out there ahead of time, but some of the freshmen have brothers, sisters, neighbors, friends who say, no, no, no, I'm gonna let you in. It's really not a good location for our freshmen should be down there. We do not provide a shuttle from campus because we don't want to facilitate these underclassmen going down to these, what our adult parties are over 21 years old. So we try to keep our freshmen and sophomores on campus and discourage going down from the beach. Great, those are all of our questions that we had. Well, thank you so much, and we wish, we wish your sons and daughters to have a very positive and productive Fairfield University experience, and believe me, we'll do the very best we can to facilitate that. Thank you.