President Steger created the Office of Recovery and Support to help the university deal with the aftermath of April 16; Director Jay Poole speaks about the role of his department, one year later.
CB: What was your job prior to the director of the Office of Recovery and Support?
JP: I didn't even work at Virginia Tech. I had taken an early retirement package from Altria, which is the parent company of Philip Morris, USA, and at that time Philip Morris International ... After what happened in April, I had already been doing work with Larry Hincker. He and Dr. Steger asked if I would be willing to come open an office, basically this office and after I said "no" a couple of times, Dr. Steger kept asking and he finally got me.
CB: When did serious discussions about starting the office begin? Were you involved in the planning? How soon did they contact you with the idea?
JP: Basically, I was with Larry (Hincker) on a Friday afternoon, and he had been down with Dr. Steger. He came back and said, 'We're thinking about opening this office that would work with the families and some others, and trying to put some of these different functions in one place, what do you think?' I said, 'I think that'd be a great idea, it makes sense.' 'Would you be even remotely interested in doing something like that?' 'No.'
So then, a couple of weeks later Dr. Steger was going out to meet with some of the families and I went along with him to kind of hear what they were saying, and then we got back and he was driving me to my car which I had parked over behind Derring, and so we got to the car and he stopped and said, 'So did Larry talk to you about this thing?' I said, 'Yeah.' 'So what did you think?' I said, 'Well, I'm still thinking about it.'
So then two weeks later, it was on the Friday before the fourth of July, he called and said, 'Have breakfast with me Monday morning.' 'Sure.' So, he twisted my arm, and I think the next obvious question is, 'Why did you do it?'
There were two reasons. One, every good thing that I have in my life, except for my wife who didn't go here, every good thing that I have in my life is a direct result of having gone to school here and gotten a degree. The second thing is, our own son was killed in a bicycle accident in 1999, and the entire Virginia Tech community just embraced us. I don't know how I would've gotten through it without it. So, what are you going to say? I could, and we could.
CB:What was your transition into the position like?
JP: There was no transition. It was like, "OK, we've got our man. We don't know exactly what it is we need you to do or how you need to be doing it, but here."
CB: So the office just started from the bottom?
JP: It literally started from scratch. Dr. Plummer, who works for Provost (Mark) McNamee, was assigned responsibility to come over here to help, and she's been here, she knows the insides and outsides of how this place works mechanically, who does what. Ellen and I had never met each other, so she just got a text message, 'You need to meet Jay Poole somewhere.' So we met over at the Inn, so we were sort of thrown together and were basically trying to figure out, what is it that we need? Little things that you would think would be apparent, and I guess coming from where I came from, I wouldn't have even known they were not there. I didn't have anybody to answer the phones. If you called, it just went into voicemail if I was on the phone. It was ringing all the time, I couldn't answer it, by the time I'd talked on the phone, I'd hang up and I've got four messages, it just didn't seem like you could get it all done.
If you go back to the reason the office was created, to try to provide more effective communication to the families. Just because of the overwhelming amount of activity that was required, it felt like initially we were failing miserably in our most important objective, which was to improve communication. It was simply a function of (the fact that) we were really starting from scratch, and to some degree, making it up as we went along.
CB: You mentioned the beginnings of communication. For you personally, what was your first interaction with victims and families?
JP: It was when I went around with Dr. Steger, when he was going to talk to some of the families in June. Again, I was just working with Larry (Hincker) at that time. I just wanted to hear with my own ears some of the concerns that they had. At that time (Hincker) was sort of trying to manage the communication, and he needed to be here, so I just kind of went along with Dr. Steger as a set of ears that would be listening through a different lens. So that's the first time that he saw some of the families. I met both families of injured students and some of the injured students themselves, and some of the families of deceased students. Especially with the families of the deceased students, because we had lost a child ourselves, I could relate to some of the things that they were saying. It's all different; it's all very, very personal. But I could sure hear, when they said some things that may not resonate with you, I could hear. I knew exactly what they were saying.
CB: Over the past year, how has your relationship with them developed? For you personally, has your contact waned as you've become more of a figurehead or are you still in personal contact with the families?
JP: A little of both. One of the things that we did fairly quickly after we got up and running was to identify counselors, liaisons, you can pick a word, whose sole job was to provide outreach and seek to create two-way communications with these families ... We did a lot of communications by e-mail, and still do most of the communications by e-mail. Sometimes we pick up the phone and call, sometimes they call us. Part of the early days was a process of trial and error on our part, more error than success. I think it was a feeling-out process on the part of the families. Whether, 'do these people have a clue what they're doing, do they have any idea what we're feeling, are they really for us, or is this a PR stunt for the university, can we really trust them, are they really our advocates?'
... Now, we did things that I'm sure were exactly the opposite of what we should have done, and created more anxiety and more angst. These folks had enough of their own problems, they didn't need for us to be adding to them, and that's the part that just, in retrospect you think about some of the dumb things we did and some of the dumb things we said. But that all having been said, over time we've developed a relationship with some of them, with a number of individuals within the families, not all. At the same time, we're also working with the injured students themselves, and we have a responsibility in this office for making sure to the extent that we can that we want them to have the best social and academic education they can possibly have given the little kind of a hell that they went through. That's been a significant component of what we've done.
CB: You mentioned one of the issues starting out was figuring out how you're going to do things properly, in retrospect, when you were first starting out, what was your biggest success and what were some of the biggest mistakes?
JP: The best success we had, fortunately we got the right people, and the right mix of people, in this office. We all work well together, and we knew what our job was. We all worked well enough together to where we found ways we could to improve the communication and try to build some trust with the families. I think in some ways that was the biggest success, building the team on the run at the same time, so that we could begin to hopefully provided outreach and be the kind of information conduit that the families would like, and so that if they felt they needed something, they could call here and there's a fair chance we could get it for them. Or if they had a complaint, or something, they could call down here and we'd try to fix it. You know about the bureaucracy that is Virginia Tech, if you think about a grieving parent, trying to put together nuts and bolts and people are on vacation at Tech, they're still in shock about what happened, then you get the run-around. So, the fact that there is one place where these families could call, there was a shot that we would at least pay attention to them, and we would get back to them, we may not be able to resolve their issue. So I think that was a big success, early on, and I think the mistake that, if I had to do a do-over, would be, you know we were so focused on the families that lost husbands, wives, moms, dads, brothers, sisters, kids, that we didn't pay enough attention to the families of the injured students. We were doing everything we can with the injured students, we had one and now two people who do nothing but work with the injured students, but we weren't really providing much communication to their parents. In retrospect you go, 'how could I have missed that?' We wanted to be very respectful of the privacy of the students, but at the same time looking back on it, I understand the dynamics between mom and dad, and them wanting to feel like somebody was looking out for their kids down here. So that's one of the things that, if I had to do-over, I would have tried to figure out a way to be a more effective communicator with the parents of the injured students.
CB: In light of the legal situations that have arisen in the past six months, the settlements and lawsuits, how much has the office been affected by that? Do the families come to you for advice or to talk about it? Do you think the relationship dynamic has changed at all, being that the office is associated with the university?
JP: We were guided in a significant way by the work of a fellow named Wynn Rosser, of Texas A&M. They had a bonfire accident in 1999 down at A&M; they had a bunch of kids killed, and a bunch injured. They created a function that was similar to ours, it wasn't set up exactly like ours was but it was very similar, and Wynn performed a role very similar to the one I (do). I talked to him a number of times during the first month or six weeks that I was doing this. The faced litigation too, and one of the conscious decisions that A&M made was that even if a family chose to litigate, that was their decision, they could do whatever they wanted, that didn't change the fact that we need to communicate with them about certain things, and we want to do what we can to make this difficult task of grieving for a lost child as easy as possible. So we sort of adopted the same thing, and discussions of litigation have been going way back to before the governor's panel report, but that really didn't change, in our minds, how we dealt with the families.
CB:I know that there has been some back-and-forth regarding the financial situation of the office. What is the status of the federal grants that seem to be taking forever?
JP: That's pretty much it. I know the DOE grant has been fully funded; the people at the Department of Education have been very helpful. Dr. (Ellen) Plummer has been working with the people at the Department of Justice and members of Congress who represent this area, Congressman Boucher and Congressman Goodlatte have been enormously helpful in trying to help find a way to pry that money loose from the Department of Justice, right now we're still waiting on it. That having been said, the remarks that have been attributed to both Larry Hincker and Charles Steger at the very beginning still hold true: 'We need to do this.' We'll find the resources to run this office, period.
CB: Do you know what has been done the past year to make it work?
JP: It clearly was, robbing Peter to pay Paul. I don't know which Peters were robbed. All I know is, we're here.
CB: The future of the office, what is in store for the next five years, 10 years?
JP: Well, we're going be here for a while. Who knows how long 'for a while' is, the folks at A&M told us that they had work that went on for five or six or seven years and, again, they were set up a little differently. So it's very clear that there is a need to continue this kind of a function for the foreseeable future. How long that is I think is going to be determined largely by events and circumstances and certainly for so long as there are students at school here who were here on April 16, 2007, I can imagine that this office is going to be here as well. That having been said, just like in a business, if the economy continues to go south and the state appropriations continue to be reduced, then a lot of people have to make difficult decisions about things. The resources used to fund this office, aren't used to fund something else. But we're going to be here for as long as necessary to continue the work that we're doing.