 Folks, think of this presentation as the opening of a conversation. You're here today taking some content, but you can certainly reach out to us in the early alert program afterward. We are at early.alert at evc.ca. I work with other people who will introduce you to shortly and then explain how we can assist you after this presentation, either with student cases or beyond. Before I go too much further, I want to acknowledge that we all participate as a working learning community located on the traditional ancestral and unseated territory of Musqueam people. Although you see that I don't have my video on, I'm using a docked laptop. I'm coming to you today from the UBC Vancouver Point Great Campus. The outcomes for this presentation are as follow. I want to help you know the purpose and process of the early alert program at UBC, how we integrate with the UBC suite of colleagues, offices and services, and how it integrates with something called the UBC Green Folder. I want you to be able to identify student concerns and submit early alerts. And I want you to have the confidence to engage students by providing active offers of support and collaborating with other UBC staff as appropriate. I mentioned previously that I'm part of a team. Well, Chad Heisen is our director. Chad is the director of student conduct and safety at UBC. We're all working out of their vice president of students portfolio. And I'm one of five managers of student support services. That's a long title. We sometimes go by early alert case managers or just early alert staff. It's me, Cindy Hallett, Magalie Chevalier, Amy Vosel, and Emma Smith. So when you email early.alert at UBC.ca, you will be in touch with all five of us. We staff that email address in a staggered fashion. So no matter when you email us, one of us will be able to take a look at the email and respond within 24 hours when it comes to the work week. If you email us on the weekend, we'll respond to you the following Monday or the following business day. I'm going to take a bit of a sidetrack and mention something called the UBC Green Folder. There's a separate presentation that we do offer regarding the Green Folder. I want to just touch on it here to explain that a lot of what I'm talking about when it comes to supporting students in distress is captured in that document and I'll paste this link straight into the chat so you have it. What I want to explain is this folder summarizes a list of services that you can use to refer students to. Student comes to you in distress. You're not altogether sure how to refer them or where to help them go. The Green Folder gives you a roadmap of options that you can provide to students, everything from calling 911 all the way to mental health and wellness supports through the regular UBC campus options. I mentioned emailing this address early.alert. I will show you later on in the presentation how to fill up the early alert form for a specific student case. The case may become complicated. You may have questions about an issue that you're not sure about and you're not sure if you should submit an early alert or not. Consult with us by emailing that address. We're available to support you as well as the students who are in distress. Okay, so what is the early alert program? The rationale and benefits for our program involve providing support to students as early as possible. For their academics, health, financial and other concerns. When we're working with students who are in distress regarding these types of things, it's often best if the student gets help early and often. We provide a centralized and aggregated approach, which is to say the vice president of students portfolio isn't connected to a specific faculty or unit or kind of a hub at the center of a wheel. And all the spokes of that wheel are the different kinds of student services, including the faculty advising the student counseling and mental health center for accessibility and other related offices. So we try using the wheel analogy. Again, I mentioned spokes while we're trying to create a circle of care around the student using all of us. It is the case that students who are in distress with their academics and health may share that first with faculty and TAs and sometimes staff. Oftentimes, those people are in the least appropriate position to provide those kinds of services to the student. And we're here to help you connect the student with the right supports so you can feel that you've done your part in referral and then you can continue on doing the job of teaching research and other kinds of aspects of your role. So next I have a couple kind of graphic illustrations. This illustration is the best case scenario. Lots of text on the slide. What's most important here is the left hand axis. We look at the wellness and academic success from red down here. Students in significant distress with health and academic performance all the way to green up here where the students performing very well and their health is in good shape. So what tends to happen is, if you look on the horizontal axis, it says time at UBC. That can be read as time at UBC in the given program. The student may begin their program in very good position with health and academics and then encounter different kinds of struggles, whether it's transition in first year, whether it's the death of a family member, parental divorce, many different kinds of external factors can negatively affect a student's health or academic performance. And that's represented by the blue dot where a student's performance becomes noticed by somebody like a TA or a faculty member. And maybe that person on that first instance I say here fails first midterm and the TA or professor emails the student. The student is non responsive. So the TA or the professor submits an early alert. We in early alert coordinate an academic advisor in the student's faculty to reach out and offer support. The student accesses the support from the advisor and gets the appropriate referrals and that could be everything from referral to counseling. The student health, in other words campus doctor's office, or it could also be academic concessions deferred exams. I'm thinking of this time of year. And then you see the student bounces back and returns to suitable academic success and suitable wellness on the graph here. Another kind of situation is a bit different where the student doesn't just fail their first midterm. But they maybe have a health crisis. And then after a couple more terms end up on academic probation. So many different things have gone wrong in this student's life. And finally an early alert gets submitted later on, perhaps by an academic advisor, when they're on probation, and that student meets with somebody. And lots of intensive support is brought to bear to provide that student help to get back on track with their health wellness and academic success. So in either case, we are here to help link the students with supports and coordinate those supports collaboratively. In this first illustration, you can see that getting the student help earlier is better. A student who goes without help for longer can end up in a much worse state when it comes to their wellness and academic success. So these are some key characteristics of the program that often speak to concerns people have. And I put in red and bold, confidential, non punitive and transparent. So within the limits of personal safety, the early alert program is confidential. In the case of danger to self or others, we breach students confidence because safety comes ahead of that confidence. In the early alert program is non punitive. It may be the case that a student who is in distress is also engaging in an academic or non academic process. At early alert, we do not focus on that discipline process in any regard, we provide only the services and supports for health wellness and academic success. Certainly, if ever you want to submit an early alert about a student going through discipline process, we encourage you to also submit the discipline process concern to the appropriate dean or director who administers academic or non academic misconduct respectively. Finally, it says transparent, which to say the early alert program is not a secret system. We encourage you to be open and transparent with students where appropriate about the early alert program. If you have concerns about that, we encourage you to email us directly instead of submitting the early form. Additional characteristics of the program are that were centralized. I mentioned that earlier. We are connected to any specific faculty. Rather, we're a hub at the center of a wheel and all the faculties, all the services that I mentioned earlier are the spokes on that. All of the support we provide through early alert is optional. We make sure that students have the support available to them that they need. Then they can make the decisions that are right for them about accessing those supports or not. So we want to make sure that we don't pressure students into accessing the support they feel isn't right for them. We're integrated with UBC student services. So if an early alert comes in about about a typical kind of problem, we may link the student up with places like student counseling or the center for accessibility. All of those offices know us very well and we collaborate very carefully to make sure the student gets the right referral. Finally, here you see it's not part of the student's academic record. So if you're ever talking with the student about this early alert program, make it clear that there's no record on their transcript about having an early alert and receiving support through us. Typical years, well over the years, the number of early alerts that get submitted continues to grow. In the 21 and 22 academic year, we saw a total of 2358 early alert cases for 1825 students. So what that means is for some of those students, multiple early alerts were submitted. Of the 2358 cases, we decided that about 77% so 1591 needed to have somebody reach out to the students and offer support. The remaining 33%, right, 77%, the remaining 33%, we were able to evaluate that the student was already being supported by other people on campus, or that the case was a low enough level of risk that the person who submitted the report, the early alert concern had already supported the student themselves. So out of the 1591, we see 1260 students were offered supports and accepted the supports that were offered. So that's kind of how it breaks down. Typical types of categories that we see about, you know, 70% involved mental health and nearly half or 45% involve academic attendance or performance. Remaining percentage scattered across other concerns including finances, self harm and conduct and behavior. I mentioned the green folder previously. I mentioned confidentiality in the non punitive nature of the service. I put this slide in here just as a reminder, in addition to what I've already said that early alert is not an emergency service. So, again, confidential, non punitive, centralized, not on the academic record. We're also not an emergency service. So we encourage everybody who has a concern about the student in distress. If appropriate, call emergency services, including 911 first. And I'll give you an example of when appropriate. If the student sends you an email saying that they're about to hurt themselves. They tell you in class that they have a plan to go home and undertake self harm behaviors that's very, very serious. That's when you want to be calling 911 and bypassing early alert. You can do that and submit an early alert later on. So student safety in the event of imminent danger, students got a plan, they're about to hurt themselves. This has been disclosed to you. You want to call 911 and more of that's detailed in the green folder. Like I say, next I'm going to talk about the case management process. We have a three phase case management process. Phase one is where the student in distress is noticed. And an early alert is submitted. That's in the red box on the slide. Most often the student in distress is noticed by people on the front lines, faculty, instructors, TAs, residents, staff, some academic advising staff. Those people, when it comes to serious mental health and complex academic problems are often least positioned to provide immediate support. We are here to bridge that gap. So on the one hand, we want to make sure that we refer the student to the right people. On the other hand, and I always try to emphasize this as one of your colleagues as part of the university community here, we have your back right the early alert program doesn't want to put on your shoulders. The responsibility of having to do the entire suite of student services for an individual student. We want you to use us lean on us to connect the student with the right services so that you can rest assured and go back to your regular role. So that's phase one is noticing the concern and submitting it. We provide supports and referral. Often we use the green folder ourselves. And we encourage you as well when you're speaking with the student to use the green folder. Filling up the early alert form is what happens at phase one. I'm going to describe that to you a little bit later on in the session. So, please keep that in mind. I'm going to put this slide in here because often people ask, when I'm thinking about submitting an early alert, how do I tell the student, do I tell the student. Well, first of all, you may not always have the opportunity, the student may email you expressing significant distress over a weekend. And then you may submit the early alert and not see the student again until Tuesday or Thursday the following week when classes on or even now we're in the final exam period. You may submit an email to you and you may not have a chance to have a face-to-face conversation with the student about what's going on. So you may submit early alert without speaking to the student. If you are speaking with the student or if the student does come to you and ask you about the early alert, we encourage you to emphasize the confidentiality, the non punitive nature, and the optional nature of the program. Any services offered to the student as part of the early alert process can be ignored or refused by the student. We want to give as much agency, see the second point, student agency, we want to give as much agency and control to the student as we can. Listening to their own description of their needs and making a referral that is appropriate for what they feel that they need. In this job of supporting students and staff for many, many years, I've often seen cases where we feel a student is making some decisions about their health or academics that we would not make in their shoes. That is okay. We must do our best to respect them and provide them the right help and they can access access that help when they feel it is appropriate. Okay, put a sample message here to how you can speak with students. You don't have to cut and paste this. This is written in my voice. I encourage you to write it in your voice. It's meant to illustrate three key points. It says I'm concerned about your academics, or well being right. So again, you want to express, look, I care about my students, and I'm worried about you. Although I can't help you directly with these things, I use the early alert to link you with the right campus supports. In the business, we call that the contrasting statement. So a student comes to you with a serious mental health concern, let's say, or bereavement or a serious academic program-wide academic problem that's beyond your scope of practice. On the one hand, you're saying to the student, I can't help you. On the other hand, you're saying, I want you to get help and I'm going to link you with the right campus supports. A UBC support staff may contact you for help and you can choose to reply or not if and if or when you access supports. That emphasizes the optional nature and that emphasizes that it's in the student's hands, right? So key messaging, I mentioned confidentiality, non punitive and optional nature, express that you're concerned. You don't have to be a counselor to express that you're concerned and use the contrasting statement, right? Even though I can't help you directly, I'm not a counselor. I don't work for the Center for Testability. I'm not an academic advisor. I don't know every credit hour and prerequisite requirement of your program. I want to link you to the people who know those things so you can get the help you need. And then finally, that any help offered, you can choose to access or not. I'm going to open up the early alert online form and walk you through it. When you fill out the form, it's best to think of the early alert online form as your email message to the team, right? Brian, Cindy, Amy, Magalie, Emma, we're the managers of student support services. The early alert form stands in as your email to us about a student in concern who you want to see get help, right? And I'll talk about descriptive objective language. I'll talk about using the green folder as a reference. And I'll talk about including accuracy documentation and things like that. So while I switch to this on my screen, please feel free to join in with questions or write them in the chat. Thank you. So this is the early alert form. And I'm going to paste the link to the form right in the chat so you have it. You can put this as a desktop bookmark on your browser or you can just type in Google UBC early alert and you will come to this page. You will log in using your campus wide login when you press this button. And then you will be taken to this page. So this is the red button. Submit an early alert concern. You will be able to see this red button. And this is what you want to click to open up the form. Immediately at the top you're greeted by a message that says we're not an emergency response system and in case of immediate or ongoing harm to self or others call 911 or your local emergency services and then submit an early alert UBC Vancouver uses early alert as well as UBC Okanagan. We review the early alerts within 24 hours of submission and they review their early alerts Monday to Friday during the business hours. As you're filling out this form you're giving us critical information including what type of concern this is. It could have multiple concerns. A student may be involved in academic problems with attendance and mental health problems. A student sends you an email saying I've been extremely depressed and anxious. Both. I can't get out of bed. That's why I've been missing so many classes in labs. You've got academic and mental health and down here you've got some boxes of sub concerns. So for mental health you can check things like withdrawal from usual activities. And then here most important part of the entire early alert form. This is where you describe the nature of the concern. This is your email to us telling us what happened, how you know about this concern, what you feel is going on, was there any impact on the learning environment, etc. Do your best to use behavioral and objective language here. This document everybody is something that can be requested by the student through a Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act request. So we encourage you to be as objective professional and descriptive as possible. There's a spot for date and then there's spot for your thoughts about the level of risk. You don't have to be a threat assessment and risk evaluation professional to click low medium or high here. We want to get a sense of where you're at. You can also use the green folder as a reference for how serious the concern will be, but we want to get a sense of where you're at with the concern. That's one more piece of information down here where you input the students name and student ID number. And then you can note other students involved, the course that's relevant to the concern and any actions that you may have taken to date. Maybe you've met with the student. Maybe you've not done anything except submit the early alert. That's fine. Selecting one of these is your next step. Finally, actions taken to date and further details. That's when you explain to us if you've done anything met with the student. Let's say replied to the students email, gave the student a link to the counseling office, advise students to call 911 right away. Those kinds of things are what you want to put here on the actions taken. Here's where you put your information, your name, your role faculty teaching assistant or staff, and then your department faculty, your email and your phone number. That way we can contact you if we have further questions. And then down at the very bottom you'll see you can upload documents. For example, you may want to upload screenshots, you may want to upload. If a student provides a medical document to you, although it may be inappropriate if you're in an instruction role, you may want to upload that or you may want to upload the email itself that you received from the student. And you want to press submit. Do not press save. If you're filling out the early alert form and you run into snags, you have questions or difficulty again, you can email early.alertedvc.co. Okay. So, I've worked with many staff people. And I respect all of your safety and privacy. You may feel that a student is in distress. And that student may also be behaving in a way that makes you feel unsafe. You may feel concerned that by submitting an early alert, it may reveal things to the student that you don't want to because of the nature of the student's behavior, yet at the same time, somebody needs to help the student because they're deeply unwell. It's a certain contact early.alertedvc.co. Don't feel like you have to put yourself in an awkward position by filling out the form. Contact us directly. That's a nuanced situation where we want to balance support and care for the students in our respective roles, as well. If the student's behaviors of a certain kind, support and care for you, the staff person or the faculty and the instructor or a. Please, if you feel concerned or uncomfortable about submitting the early alert for any reason, do let us know and we're happy to walk you through that one-on-one. Okay. So, you've submitted the early alert concern. Within about 24 hours, you'll get an email from one of us case managers saying, dear so-and-so, thank you so much for your concern about the student. The early alert case number is as follows. Please contact us if you have further questions or concerns. We will organize supports for the student as appropriate moving forward. Okay. That may be the last time you hear from us. We invite you to contact us if you have questions, if you want to follow up, or if new concerns emerge. But given some of the nuances of student confidentiality, we typically don't report back to you who submitted the early alert about the final resolution. When we review the concerns, we decide, first of all, is the student already being supported? So the student may come to you as an instructor and say, or use a CA and say, listen, I'm dealing with some. Difficult family issues, spouses, abuse, mental health, academic deficiency, I need a lot of help. And then you submit an early alert. On the back end, me or one of my colleagues, view the student academic record, review the student advising notes. And we may discover that immediately after meeting you, the student not with an academic advisor, and received a whole bunch of appropriate support. Therefore, there may be no need for us to deal with each other at all, because the students already being supported. We're of the mind that the fewest number of contacts to the student, the better. In other words, if it is the case that a student advisor has already provided support for the student, which is appropriate. Getting an email from an early alert, a case manager is just going to be fatiguing to the student. If we determine that there is nobody supporting the student already. So the students saw an academic advisor in first year, which is now back in 2020. And they're having difficulty at this time. We may decide to delegate the reach out to an appropriate advisor and the students on faculty center for accessibility advisor if the student is registered, or one of us case managers may be doing the reach out directly to the student, in which we're introducing ourselves in the email explaining that we're confidential and optional, and then offering the student an opportunity to connect with us, where we will do some planning with the student about what services are best. I would say that 80% of the cases that are going to a reach out, go to other staff, or 20% of the cases we early alert case managers are doing the reach out. And often it's, you know, from a trauma informed and from a services best practice point of view. We're looking to see if the student already has a relationship with a service provider like an advisor in the program. Who can use their existing rapport and relationship with the student to create a welcoming space for the student to access how we never want to put a UBC staff person in a position where they're having to do work outside their scope. But we want to make sure that wherever possible, we're getting students connected to people who they may already know. In the most complex student cases. If you recall the earlier diagram. That I showed you student has multiple concerns academic physical health mental health financial. The early alert case manager, we stand in as a meta level case manager. So we may be coordinating enrollment services advisor for the finances, student counseling center for accessibility for the mental and physical health concerns. We will be making referrals to student health regarding physical health concerns, and we may be linking up with a specific academic advisor in the students faculty and coordinating one of those people to provide the support to the students. Again, you may not hear back from us about all of those activities. So it is the case that you will observe the student in distress and submit an earlier concern will let you know we've got it will take steps. A month later, you may notice the same student experiencing distress and wonder what the heck happened. I submitted the earlier alert the students in the same position. By all means reach out to us if you have questions, but it is sometimes likely that students may or may not have access to services offered. And again, we respect their agency when it comes to their decisions about their own health and academic success, our main role is to present their options and services. So you assume to make that decision. So this next slide talks about confidentiality and privacy. We do share limited information if we're coordinating with each other. So I'll give you the example of an academic advisor. If you submit an earlier concern about a student who's got some attendance or academic deficiency problems who may need academic concessions, like the straws or sds. We will share a small amount of information to the academic advising staff for a very short amount of time. And only to those specific staff, we're going to do the reach out. And then that access to that information from the early alert disappears within four weeks, and that's when the case ends up resolved or shortly after that. And so when we coordinate the reach out by Allied Campus Services, we are sharing limited information only for a short time, and only with the people who are going to do reach out to the student. In addition to resources for students, we do have resources for faculty staff in some ways. You can certainly talk about a program through your courses in your course single by. There's information on early data, sorry, early alert.ubc.ca about what you can provide as part of those things, or you can consult with one of us about how best you can communicate with your students on mass or individually. So early alerts. A piece of a puzzle. The puzzle is gigantic. So we are a grand industrial institution serving tens of thousands of students with tens of thousands of faculty staff in two days. And different options and offices exist to help students with an array of different kinds of concerns. Early alert focuses specifically on academic distress and health distress. We invite you to make active offers as part of your program and encounters with the students that could look like something as simple as a note on the first day of class or on your canvas landing page, or on your course syllabus that you participated in the early alert program to help you link students with support, give your student if you're having trouble accessing the right support, let me know and I can make do with my colleagues. You can make referrals yourself to a student. You don't necessarily always have to submit early alert. If a student comes to you at this time of year and says, I need to get a deferred exam, because I'm sick. You can do that. And you know you're comfortable. Oh, you go to your faculty advisor in arts, science, forestry, what have you, and ask them if you're comfortable doing that, you can make the referral in many cases. I put here sexual harassment sexual assault and gender based file. And that's a link. The sexual violence prevention and response office has made a very good point, a long long time ago for a program. It's not something that a student can consent to. It's a way of communicating from one campus staff back to your TA to others, the service array, including the early like case managers. It's not a consensual role. So, even though the student can consent to access the services offered, they can't consent to having the early alert submitted. So, when you encounter a student who discloses a report sexual harassment assault or gender based violence, we don't want that student feeling that consent has been violated yet again. By having an early alert submitted. We advise that you would be directed to the SP pro sexual violence prevention response office. You'll have the SP PR sexual violence prevention response office link. That's where you want to go. Not really a lot in cases of sexual harassment assault and gender based violence. When it comes to academic or non academic misconduct. You want to be using the right channels for that that could be the Dean of the faculty that could be Chad Heisen director of student conduct and safety. So, if you have an early alert, unless there is co occurring distress expressed by the student, right. Using the emergency resources is important ahead of early alert. And sometimes for many different concerns. I said you can consult us early dot early DC dot CA we're here to help you. Also your department and faculty, right, your Dean director or department head can also provide you with advice and support in many kinds of kinds of cases. So think of early alert and between here as a piece of a larger puzzle to support you as you support the students. Finally, finding further support, not just for students but also for yourselves, right I have down here at the bottom, the orange folder. It's how to help a staff person, the co worker who's in distress, and the, oops, and the employee, the FAP, the employee and family assistance program that is provided as part of our staff benefits program at the DC. And you offer them a way of kinds of services and keeping counseling for us. Sometimes there's contact trauma sometimes there's compassion fatigue that we all feel as different kinds of staff at QBC, and there is help for us as well.