BURLINGTON, Vt. — Pledges by college students to eschew drugs and alcohol are old hat. Now they’re meditating, working out, practicing yoga, eating healthfully, and at least one school, the University of Vermont, it has become a bona fide lifestyle.
In UVM’s Wellness Environment, known as WE, students live in a new, big substance-free dorm, take a required class in what affects the health of their brains and bodies, and are given incentives to stay healthy like access to a free gym membership, nutrition and fitness coaches and an app that tracks their activities.
“We created an environment where we believe if we offer young people healthy foods, healthy choices, they’ll make them. We reward those things, and we don’t encourage the negative things, so the rule in the environment is no alcohol, no drugs, and the students follow it,” said Dr. Jim Hudziak, the chief of child psychiatry at the UVM’s Larner College of Medicine, who founded the Wellness Environment or WE program.
It goes beyond the wellness and substance-free residential halls found at some colleges.
“It looks at them (students) as an individual, which is really important obviously for health and wellness, but then it’s also making changes to their community,” said David Arnold, of the Washington-based NASPA, Student Affairs Administrators in Higher Education.