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As part of Disabilities Awareness Month and Mental Health Awareness Month, Kent State’s Student Accessibility Services hosted a “Coloring for Calmness” event this week in its offices within the .

The room that is staged for the event features soft lighting and evenly spaced tables topped with crayons, markers and a selection of coloring pages.

The office hosts several of these coloring events each semester and anyone – students, faculty and staff – are welcome to attend. This was the second-to-last coloring event of this semester and featured coloring pages designed for Disabilities Awareness Month. The next event is timed to help students de-stress before finals week. “Mega Color for Calmness” sessions will take place Dec. 4-6.

‘I Can Zone Out in my Own World’

Jude Carver, a sophomore major (“I know, it’s long,” he said), from Cleveland, Ohio, was coloring at the event. He enjoys the opportunity to disconnect and create. “I can zone out in my own world and color away,” Carver said. “And when I’m done, I can look at the result and see how nicely I colored it in.”
Carver also is a member of Kent State’s Combat Robotics Team. This group of students brainstorms, designs and creates robots to take into battle against other teams at various "battle bots" competitions. The team travels several times a year to compete with the ’bots they have built. Carver is looking forward to an upcoming competition in January.

At first, Carver had the entire room to himself. Later, students who had been attending the “Paws for a Cause Puppy Meet-Up” event that was happening just down the hall filtered in and out of the room to color for a while.

Adam Nowicki and James Trombka are access consultants at Student Accessibility Services and were present at the event. Nowicki said that the Coloring for Calmness events in total had more than 100 attendees during the 2022-2023 academic year and that so far, “they are on pace to beat that number during this academic year.”

Trombka showed one of the new, de-stress items that Student Accessiblities Services will be offering: a textured, calming sensory strip that can attach to the back of a mobile phone. The strips have an anti-stress tactile sensory strip that feels bumpy without hurting your fingers. Mindfully running your fingertips over this surface can help reduce irritability, improve concentration and regulate restless moods.