Campus Safety Shouldn't be an Afterthought.

There is an apartment complex located just off our campus. This complex has recently been attracting the police with some of the highest number of calls for the entire city coming here. This complex is located across the street from our campus housing. This past Saturday there was an incident at the apartment complex involving a fire arm. I'm not certain if both incidents are the same, but my guess is that they are.

Our Campus Safety Department was notified of the incident, but that's where the information flow stopped. It wasn't until Monday morning that the rest of the campus was made aware of the incident. Several students were involved in the altercation. As such, given the recent events that have happened in work places, and on campus's across the country, I feel that our school let us down.

The campus was notified of the incident at 4pm on Monday. Some 60+ hours after it occurred. As our college's web developer, I'm required to carry a cell phone, and have built methods for quickly and securely announcing a campus emergency across our website. I don't know about you, but gunshots being fired less than a 100 yards from our dorms qualifies as an emergency to contact me and ensure that the site (which in a critical situation is supposedly one of our most critical methods of communicating with visitors) has an emergency message on board.

Over the past year, our school has tried to make strides on improving our campus safety, such as installing warning sirens outside the dorms and near the main campus buildings. I think it's time to challenge the college administration to take the next step and ensure we have a method in place to notify our students in this type of situation through other means as well.

I probably wouldn't be so ticked off, but to have an e-mail with the closing line of "This is your timely notification of this event" that is sent out over 2 and half days after it occurred is NOT timely.

This e-mail should have gone out to the campus personnel immediately. The website should have been updated with the emergency information until the threat was over with. And lastly, our school needs to have something in place, such as texting to also get the message out to students.

Based on the responses I have seen from our fellow staff members. I'm not alone in this feeling. Let's hope that the next time an emergency like this happens, the warning isn't swallowed for 2 days.

Cya,
Paul