Community colleges: roles, challenges, and impact

Education

Campus security and safety is an important issue in postsecondary education. The Department of Education has made a commitment to assist schools in providing students nationwide a safe environment in which to learn and to keep students, parents and employees well informed about campus security. These goals were established by the Crime Awareness and Campus Security Act of 1990. The Department of Education is committed to ensuring that postsecondary institutions are in full compliance with this Act, and enforcement of the Act is a priority of the Department. Compliance with this act, which is now known as the Jeanne Clery Disclosure of Campus Security Policy and Campus Crime Statistics Act, or Clery Act, provides students and families, as higher education consumers, with the information they need to make informed decisions (Campus Security, 2009).

The Clery Act requires higher education institutions to give timely warnings of crimes that represent a threat to the safety of students and employees. These policies must be made public to everyone. It is also required that crime data be collected, reported and disseminated to the campus community. The act is intended to provide students and their families, as higher education consumers, with accurate, complete and timely information about safety on campus so that they can make informed decisions about what college to attend (Campus Security, 2009).

To be in compliance with the Clery Act regulations, an institution has several obligations. These obligations fall into three main categories: 1) policy disclosure; 2) records collection and retention; and 3) information dissemination. In regards to the category of information dissemination it is necessary for colleges to:

To provide the campus community members with information that is necessary to make informed decisions about their safety. They must disseminate information in several ways along with providing a timely warning of any Clery Act crime that might represent an ongoing threat to the safety of students or employees.

Provide access to their crime log during normal business hours.

Publish an annual security reports and distribute them to all current students and employees. They must also inform prospective students and employees about the content and availability of the report.

Notify the campus community where they can obtain information about registered sex offenders.

Submit the institution's crime statistics through a Web-based data collection system (Campus Security, 2009).

In order to increase campus security and student safety, community colleges across the country are increasing their security efforts. With new technologies for added support and widespread tools for campus officials and student communication, community colleges are striving to provide all campus visitors with a safe and supportive environment. While each community college campus has its own unique safety and security procedures, most schools are providing students with fundamental officers, resources, and security measures (Chen, 2008).

Henry Ford Community College, located near Detroit, Michigan, provides students with a specific office designated for campus safety. The school feels that Campus Safety is responsible for maintaining and releasing incident and accident reports, key control, issuance of employee and student ID cards, maintenance of the access control system, crime statistics, crime prevention and security awareness programs such as Campus Watch and Safe Walk, as well as overall control of all security and safety operations. While Henry Ford certainly provides students with basic theft and safety efforts, their added security awareness programs help foster increased and widespread support (Chen, 2008).

Henry Ford Community College's Safe Walk program was designed by the Student Government along with the Office of Campus Safety. It is described as an integral part of a safe campus is the involvement of students in their campus community. Student volunteers for Safe Walk will provide an escort to any student or staff member who requests it. Safe Walk volunteers are trained and dispatched by the Office of Campus Safety and serve as additional eyes and ears on campus (Chen, 2008).

The college feels that Safe Walk is especially beneficial for students who have nighttime classes, or who are forced to walk on the campus alone after dark. Students wanting to use Safe Walk simply pick up one of the campus' emergency phones or call the campus security office to meet with an escort. Students in need of an escort can be confident of their designated guide's background, as all Safe Walk students are trained and supervised by the Office of Campus Safety. Students must pass a background check before being allowed into the program (Chen, 2008).

Located in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, Broward Community College is another academic institution that is focused on providing students with outstanding safety services. They encourage all faculty, staff, and campus-centered individuals to report criminal acts and safety hazards or occurrences to their Campus Security Department. The college uses several different ways to inform the college community about campus safety and security. These services are provided by the Campus Security Offices, Student Affair Offices, and through college-wide training programs. This information is disseminated through student and employee orientation, campus publications and flyers, or any other media deemed appropriate such as the internet. In order to keep students updated and informed, the campus security efforts utilize the tools of technology to help ensure the safety of all BCC students, faculty, and community members (Chen, 2008).

It is believed that every community college student can take advantage of simple steps to improve their personal safety. Students should bring a lock to school, if they will be using campus designated lockers. Students should also put their name on all possessions, including books. Officials say that many items that are found are discarded each semester because no one claims them. Also, in order to avoid any items from being lost or stolen, students should never carry more money or items than they need, and should never leave these items unattended in a class, library, or other campus setting. It has been reported that some students have left expensive laptops unattended, while they take a study break or a bathroom break. This casual error can cost a student thousands of dollars in costs if the laptop is stolen or damaged (Chen, 2008).

In order to maintain one's personal safety, students should be sure to avoid walking alone after dark. If they have to walk alone, students should plan to park their car beneath parking lights prior to class. Students should also try to park close to their classroom door's exit, so that they are not forced to walk very far by themselves. Students at most community colleges across the country, can and should take advantage of the campus security resource officers or volunteers, who can walk students to and/or from one location to another after dark in order to increase their safety (Chen, 2008).

By planning ahead and keeping safety precautions in mind, one can be safe on community college campuses, day or night. In order to help with this hundreds of colleges across the nation have purchased a training program that teaches professors and students not to take campus threats lying down but to fight back with any improvised weapon, from a backpack to a laptop computer. The program shows a video of a gunman opening fire in a packed classroom, urges them to be ready to respond to a shooter by taking advantage of the inherent strength in numbers. This program reflects a new response at colleges and universities where grisly memories of the campus shootings at Virginia Tech and Northern Illinois University are still fresh. Survivors must prepare themselves both mentally and emotionally to do what it takes. It might involve some life-threatening risk to be taken along with do something that one never thought they were capable of doing (Colleges Confront Shootings with Survival Training, 2008).

Recently nearly 300 professors at Metropolitan Community College were shown the video as part of a training exercise before the first day of classes on the downtown campus. The training helps teachers and students focus on a survival mindset. The training discourages cowering in a comer or huddling together in fear. Instead, students and teachers are taught to be aware of their surroundings and to think of common classroom objects such as laptops and backpacks as possible weapons. The program has been bought by nearly 500 colleges which have tailored the safety messages to their particular situation and campus. Schools often provide the training to students as well as staff along with instructors and security personnel (Colleges Confront Shootings with Survival Training, 2008).

A state task force in Illinois has recommended that colleges and universities increase safety training for first responders and mental health counselors and coordinate emergency plans. The Campus Security Task Force, which was formed after the deadly shootings at Virginia Tech, presented a 260-page report that suggested that after terrible things happen that are tragic and inexplicable, it is important for leaders to learn from those experiences. The task force, which was made up of nearly 50 university representatives and state officials from the Department of Human Services Illinois attorney general's office and Illinois Emergency Management Agency, surveyed higher education institutions on several topics including safety plans, training and counseling. Their recommendations, which focused on prevention and response to campus emergencies such as the deadly shootings at Northern Illinois University, included suggestions for detecting early signs of and treating mental illness. Research has indicated that the risk of violence may increase when other risk factors are involved, such as substance abuse. Training should be targeted to campus security forces and first responders, health services personnel counselors, resident advisers, coaches, and student/minority affairs staff according to the report. The group surveyed more than 112 higher education institutions in Illinois and found that about 64% have mental health counseling services. The task force's other recommendations for colleges and universities in Illinois included: becoming part of the federal government's standardized incident management process called the National Incident Management System, implement methods such as e-mail and speaker systems to alert students of an incident on campus, engaging in practice emergency drills at least twice a year and requiring more training for campus security (Ill. Campus Security Group Calls for Better Training, 2008).

One of the major criticisms that came out in the Virginia shootings was that there was a lack of speed shown in notifying the campus that two students had been shot to death. It took administrators more than two hours to get out an e-mail warning to students and staff to be cautious. This gave the gunman time to enter a classroom building and continue his deadly rampage. Communicating information to interested audiences, both on-campus and off-campus is critical during times of emergency. It is felt that colleges should be using low-tech devices such as sirens, loudspeakers and flags, both to back up and accent high-tech notification systems (Oklahoma College Security Task Force Moving Swiftly, 2007).

For months after the massacre at Virginia Tech, colleges of all kinds continued to weigh campus-safety concerns. They wanted to know how they could help troubled students and how they could better respond to emergencies. The real challenge that campuses face is that they have people coming and going all the time. People may be bringing all kinds of issues onto the campus, but it is felt that institutions may have less insight into who these people really are. In other words, a troubled student who spends only a few hours a week on a campus may prove even harder to detect and help than one who studies, eats, and sleeps there (Hoover, 2008).

This dilemma is a growing concern at two-year colleges across the country. There' has been a huge shift, at all institutions, in the recognition of the responsibility to the student. Colleges are reaching out to students that are in distress. One strategy that is being used to the revamping of orientation programs to include more information about student services, including mental-health resources. Technology is another tool that is being leveraged. Some two-year institutions, have installed video screens campus wide, which they use to promote advising and counseling services. Many community colleges are also doing more to help faculty and staff members recognize students that are in crisis (Hoover, 2008).