April 12, 2017: Dining tackles food insecurity with meal plan changes

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WEDNESDAY, APRIL 12, 2017

Dining tackles food insecurity with meal plan changes By WILLIAM NEWTON NEWS EDITOR After student activists brought forth concerns over food insecurity on campus, the College recently decided to make significant changes to dining services and the meal plan structure. Under the new plan, which will take effect next fall, the College will eliminate the 10-meal plan for all students and the 5-meal plan for seniors living on campus, reduce the cost of the 14-meal plan, allow up to two swipes at any meal on campus and open Lee’s Snack Bar from 2-5 p.m. on weekdays, offering the full menu at the lunch equivalency price. According to Steve Klass, vice president for campus life, the critical goal of ensuring that no student goes hungry prompted the administration’s decision to make these changes. “It’s important to appreciate the centrality of this principle to our decision-making, because we recognized immediately that this meant constraining some set of choices available to students on dining plans,” Klass said. “Based on this fundamental principle, we decided that, from a nutritional wellness perspective, two meals per day for seven days per week should be the minimal baseline of any dining plan offered by the College.” The changes come in response to the work of a number of student activists who

first revealed the wide scope and institutionalized nature of this issue. In the fall of 2015, Sophia Schmidt ’17, began researching food insecurity on campus through her project as an eco-advisor for the Zilkha Center. After hearing rumors of students purposefully choosing lower meal plans and getting inadequate nutrition in order to save money, she created a survey with the goal of reaching as much of the student body as possible. Since the Office of Institutional Research was unable to accommodate her or give her access to an all student listserve, she instead spread the survey through as many student groups and individual listserves as she could and got responses from half of the student body. According to the survey, one in five students said they were not always able to get enough to eat, and roughly one in three students who skip meals listed lack of money as an important reason. “The bottom line is there is a financial issue that’s causing food insecurity on campus,” Schmidt said. “Students are basically dropping down and not supplementing.” That year, Schmidt, along with Allegra Simon ’18, began brainstorming solutions, including a potential swipeshare program between students. Robert Volpi, director of dining services, however,

WILLIAM NEWTON/NEWS EDITOR

Beginning next fall, students can use their swipes at Lee’s Snack Bar between 2-5 p.m. and use up to two swipes during any meal period. did not view any of these initial solutions as feasible given the fixed budget constraints under which dining services operates. Schmidt then published her survey findings and possible solutions in an op-ed for the Record last year (“Our hungry: recognizing the needs of food-insecure students on

campus,” May 4, 2016). In the fall of 2016, Valeria Sosa Garnica ’19 and Ayami Hatanaka ’18 both gained interest in addressing food insecurity on campus. Hatanaka got in contact with Schmidt after seeing her survey results and reaching out to Klass about the issue, and Garnica, who also saw

these results posted around campus, began working on the project as an eco-advisor this year. “The three of us really hunkered down and got together to form a loose team,” Hatanaka said. After the students began extensively researching food security on campus, it became apparent that

it was institutional issue, rather than an individualized one. The students found that, among other things, minorities and students on financial aid were disproportionally affected. According to Garnica, the

SEE DINING, PAGE 5

Oxford mental health services fall short for WEPO students College wind farm efforts proved ill-fated By RACHEL SCHARF EXECUTIVE EDITOR

By SOPHIA SCHMIDT CONTRIBUTING WRITER The following is the first part of a three part series on the plan for the College to build a windfarm in Berlin, N.Y. Reed Zars '77 put his life on the line for science. At 21, he climbed 150 feet up a radio tower—without a harness—to install an anemometer. “It’s just ice on each rung going higher, higher,” Zars said of his winter 1977 ascent above Mt. Raimer. “As it gets a little more questionable with each step, the wind picks up and of course tries to dispose of you ... Your fingers are freezing … you’re being buffeted, and you have to let go to bolt this thing on.” The thing in question — an anemometer — is an instrument that measures wind speeds. Zars, then a senior at the College, needed wind speed data for his one-man crusade to reduce his school’s impact on the environment. Over the past forty years, Zars’ idea for a college-owned wind farm on Berlin Pass has been the subject of two student theses, four student feasibility reports, two summer research fellowships, numerous news articles, a public opinion survey, a Berlin zoning board of appeals meeting, a professional feasibility study and a petition. Despite the College’s recent commitment to net carbon neutrality by the end of 2020, however, the Berlin Pass wind farm is no longer under consideration. Zars is now a prominent environmental lawyer in Laramie, Wyo. His recent work taking on big utilities has earned him the nickname “the environmental lone ranger,” which, it seems, he has always been. In 1977, inspired by President Jimmy Carter’s charge to conserve energy and develop renewable resources, Zars proposed the College’s first campus conservation measures and ways to provide the school with clean electricity. Zars’ greatest conservation victory was his discovery that an oil tank in the College’s central heating plant was losing three percent of its energy to ambient heat loss. Thanks to Zars, Buildings and Grounds could insulate

the tank, reaping such significant savings that Zars’ faculty advisor petitioned — unsuccessfully — that the Board of Trustees waive Zars’ student debt. Zars’ creative ideas in the realm of renewable energy would ultimately have more of an impact. His 1977 report titled “Proposed Wind Energy System for Williams College,” complete with jokes, musings and hand-drawn graphs, suggests that three 200kW wind turbines (today’s smallest commercial turbines generate around 500 kW) be built on college-owned land atop Berlin Pass in Berlin, N.Y. In conceiving the Berlin Pass wind farm, Zars drew on his experience growing up in the Midwest, where old homestead windmills were a common sight. He and his brother had experimented with wind energy, once to the devastation of their mother’s bedroom, where a turbine landed after crashing through the roof. When Zars came to the College, he experimented more with windmills, attaching one to the roof of Baxter Hall —which was then the student center, located where Paresky Center now stands — and running a wire down to the Williams Outing Club headquarters, where it powered a radio and a light bulb. “Every student saw [the windmill and] would comment on it ... It was very fun to have that up and increase people’s awareness that in fact, right in Williamstown, we could generate some of our own power,” Zars said. With his anemometer on nearby Mt. Raimer, Zars approximated wind speeds on the College’s land, confirming his suspicion about a wind funnel effect on Berlin Pass. According to Zars’ calculations, this meant that the three turbines could produce between 20-50 percent of the college’s electricity needs. He estimated that the project would cost roughly $524,400

SEE WIND FARM, PAGE 5 USPS 684-6801 | 1ST CLASS MAIL U.S. POSTAGE PAID WILLIAMSTOWN, MA PERMIT NO. 25

In the first part of a Closer Look on mental health resources abroad, the Record explored the experiences and concerns associated with studying abroad at a program approved by but not associated with the College. This week, we turn our attention to experiences with mental health at one of the only study-abroad program operated by the College: the WilliamsExeter Programme at Oxford (WEPO). Across all of the study away programs approved by the College, mental health resources vary by program in large part along the lines of divergent standards and expectations of the host country’s culture. This same trend plays out in student experiences with mental health services at WEPO; the ways in which its mental health resources differ from those found at the College are closely tied to England’s culture surrounding mental health and their socialized health care system, the National Health Service (NHS). As students at Oxford, WEPO participants have free access to two lines of formal treatment: the Oxford University Counseling Center (OUCC) and local hospitals through the NHS. However, both options tend to have long waiting lists and offer almost exclusively shortterm counseling services. Gretchen Long, professor of history and current director of WEPO, explained how the OUCC is structured around

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CHRISTIAN RUHL/SENIOR EDITOR

Oxford's mental health services are both difficult to access and short-term in care. temporary counseling. “The mental health services do offer counseling, but it’s often on a short-term basis. They will often see a student for a few sessions that seem quite targeted at one specific problem,” she said. “They are primarily concerned with keeping students safe. They do not offer the kind of ‘on tap’ therapy that students might have been used to at Williams. This model is true at Oxford, and indeed, I think, over most of the U.K.” The OUCC’s services, in fact, terminate after six weeks for any student. Wait times for the OUCC can also be much longer than students in need are comfortable with. Teague Morris ’17,

who attended WEPO last year, recalled learning that he would have to wait six weeks to see a counselor. Dean of the College Marlene Sandstrom, who served as WEPO director during the 2014-2015 term, concurred that this long waiting list is a common occurrence at Oxford. “While the [OUCC] is well-equipped to provide good care, our students have sometimes reported facing waitlists or session caps at times, depending on the current demand on the system,” she said. The other cost-free formal therapy options that WEPO students have access to are those provided by the NHS.

SEE MENTAL HEALTH, PAGE 5

1977 ILLUSTRATION OF ZARS’ PROPOSAL FOR THE BERLIN WINDFARM BY MARK LIVINGSTON.

3 OPINIONS

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4 NEWS

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7 FEATURES

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8 ARTS

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