April 21st, 2008
Does Your Campus Pass the College Safety Test?

Today’s post is courtesy of guest blogger Amye Cole.

With the one-year anniversary of the Virginia Tech shootings on everyone’s mind, students, parents and administrators are all asking one another how they can keep students safe on increasingly unsupervised college campuses. Administrators must deal with a wide range of potential problems, from the specter of mass killings to the more common but equally tragic instances of individual assault. But they must do so in a way that does not violate the civil rights of students with mental health problems.

But while they wrestle with those policy issues, what can you do? Make a more educated decision about your college’s safety by asking a few basic questions:

1) Campus Security: Fundamental college safety calls for twenty-four-hour security personnel. But are these officers required to patrol the campus by bicycle, foot, or golf cart – or is their minimum duty just to sit in a car? Check who answers the emergency phone line: is it the officer sitting in the parking lot? Or is it an operator who calls a dispatcher who then alerts the on-campus security officer?

2) Hall Monitors: The Resident Assistants and Resident Directors are often known for catching freshman with alcohol. But are they trained in emergency response and first aid? In times of crisis, students often call these live-in staff before calling campus security.

3) Night Life: When students are going home from a night class (or returning from the bar), are there enough lights on campus? Ask about blue light phones for emergency calls or whether campus security will escort you to your dorm late at night.

4) Each Second Counts: What’s your college safety prevention and response plan? Every school should have a published emergency response plan and include immediate campus safety alerts through text messaging, emailing, or even the old-fashioned phone tree.

Online colleges, of course, don’t suffer from this problem. But when choosing a school, your first decision should always be based on whether they have the right program or environment for you, whether it’s online or on-campus. Safety is just one more issue that, unfortunately, we have to be aware of in today’s world.

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Filed under: Online Degrees — Cliff @ 2:10 pm
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2 Comments »

  1. Campus saftey is often times over looked until it hits close to campus for most students. Perhaps people who are suffering from a mental illness are the ones that suffer inside the most. With campus saftey knowledge, colleges should require a psychatric/psychology course. One that helps students understand themselves and those around them. Often times the ones that step over the edge are people who evidentally had something wrong with them mentally. But, who wants to be the peer pointing out someones level of sanity without feeling uncomfortable about their rational . The uncomfortable truth that is so hard to capture in it’s full essence without, disturbing “happiness”, the forbiden unconscious archetypes of beings. In other words, EDUCATION, does not disrupt civil rights, and can also be a tool to preventing tragic instances everywhere. With communication ignorance is not ignored, it is understood! I hope colleges begin a program, that is required freshman year, that allows communication and education of mental disorders and behaviors.

    Comment by Anonymous — April 22, 2008 @ 7:06 pm

  2. Amye, great information for everyone college students and parents. Very insightful, give us more to read!

    Comment by Vicki — April 23, 2008 @ 7:57 am

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