Sandy Signor

Comments from those whose lives have been impacted by Sandy Signor

Sandy Signor has changed forever the face of support services for students at Mount Wachusett Community College. When she first joined the college staff in September of 1974, her role was that of health care counselor and coordinator of the health center services. She brought to this job an awareness that it must be more than band aids and aspirin. It needed to include health education, prevention and awareness. She incorporated these themes into college programming, course work and individual interactions. She was a woman with many goals, hopes, dreams and ideas of how to help people to help themselves more qualitatively, effectively and with dignity.

From the beginning of her time at MWCC she knew that although the student came to see her with a singular medical issue, this was often only a piece of a greater picture. She realized in order to help students move forward in their lives, including at MWCC, she had to be able to incorporate aspects of the whole person, body, mind and spirit. She continued both her formal and informal education to be able to reach this goal. She came to MWCC with a BS in Nursing from Fitchburg State College and a Diploma in the Adult Nursing Practitioner Program from the Harvard School of Continuing Education and MA General Hospital. While at MWCC she earned her M.Ed. in Counseling Psychology from Fitchburg State College in 1977 and her C.A.G.S. in Counseling Psychology from Anna Maria in 1981. She is certified as an RN, a Nurse Practitioner, and a Mental Health Counselor. She took all she had learned and combined it with her own innate gifts and talents and was able to help students find the healthy parts of their lives and move forward using their abilities.

In 1976, when Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act became law, Sandy’s role expanded to include the Section 504 Coordinator. She helped the college administration understand how to make the buildings and programming accessible. Again, she educated herself on all the aspects of the law, as well as what it meant to make the programming accessible to all students. More importantly, she helped students to look at their abilities, many of them for the first time, and not their disabilities. She helped students to believe in themselves and there are many students leading meaningful and productive live, who would attribute it to the encouragement they received from Sandy and her belief in them. She facilitated the founding of the Wachusett Handicap Organization, a student group whose purpose was to promote better understanding and awareness of disability issues. This club still exists under the name ABLE (Advocates for a Better Learning Environment). Sandy, with student participation and guidance, held annual awareness days, where everyone including top administrators and faculty could experience for a day some inkling of what it was like to have a disability. (Please see her attached memo.) Today, MWCC has the greatest number of students with disabilities of any of the community colleges in Massachusetts and is well known for the atmosphere of acceptance and services provided.

As time passed, it became increasingly more apparent to Sandy that she was spending greater amounts of time helping students to process their personal issues. Although she established a referral network of community resources including counseling mental health agencies and private practitioners, the students continued to need support on campus. As one person she could not continue to provide all the health education and counseling needs of the college community. With statistical data to validate the need, she was able assist the administration with understanding the need for two separate positions, one of health educator and one of college counselor. In July of 1991, Sandy Signor became the college counselor at MWCC.

It is difficult to enumerate all the ways Sandy has both enriched the college community and expanded their horizons. For many years, Sandy has served as consultant and resource to the community on her areas of expertise, including disability issues, the Myers Briggs Personality Type Indicator, stress management and holistic health care, to mention a few. Sandy helped to write many grants on campus including the FIPSE grant, which enabled the college to have extensive educational services for drug and alcohol prevention. When other grants on campus were able to support grant specific counselors, Sandy encouraged and facilitated the concept of teams on campus, including the Emergency Evacuation Team, the Counseling Team, the Team for Students with Disabilities, and the Career Services Team. Although Sandy was the first person qualified on campus to administer and interpret the Myers Briggs Type Indicator, she has supported many more staff in their efforts to become qualified. Sandy has shared her knowledge and expertise in this area with the whole college community by facilitating workshops on team building and leaderships styles and conducting classes for students. Sandy has always been an active member of many committees, most recently the Outcome Committee. While the opening statement read that Sandy has forever changed the face of support services for students, it should have read Sandy Signor has forever changed the face of Mount Wachusett Community College and was an integral part of making it what it is today.

-Nancy Kennedy
College Counselor