College prepares safety plans

By Jill Wakefield

An urgent question at South Seattle Community College is how best to strengthen the safety of our students and staff. We're all too familiar with headline news about tragic events at school campuses across the country.

The safety question has generated a wide range of possible answers at our college. One idea raised is to have our campus security officers carry firearms. The four-year universities in our state have been given that authority by the state Legislature. But the Legislature has not granted the same powers to any of the 34 community and technical colleges across the state. And we're not certain that is the best solution for us. While it is possible to envision some situations where armed campus personnel might be able to resolve a dangerous situation, we've also learned that those tragic events can erupt so suddenly that they are difficult to prevent, with or without guns.

Facing that reality, we have focused our attention on improving emergency response and communication systems at South. Our increased attention began more than a year ago when we decided to implement the standards of the National Incident Management System (NIMS), the national organizational model for responding to emergencies. A number of key staff members have taken training and become "NIMS certified" in order to respond to incidents in a consistent way. We have conducted drills to think through how best to handle situations like an earthquake. We respond to a written scenario and use feedback from observers to make changes for improvement.

This year, our state Legislature passed, and Gov. Chris Gregoire recently signed, a bill that requires campus safety plans for the state's colleges and universities. South already has such a plan and also has implemented a number of other practices called for in the legislation, including enhanced access to counseling services for students and staff.

The new state legislation also emphasizes emergency communications. After investigating solutions and testing some equipment, we have implemented several new ways in which we will notify students and staff about emergency situations. Here are three now in use, plus one we will add by this summer:

- "Campus Alerts" e-mail and cell phone text messages. Students and staff can subscribe to receive messages, which are sent by security officers and other college officials. While there is no cost for email, those who elect to receive text messages will be responsible for any charges from their cell-phone carrier.

- A "pop-up" message on campus computer screens. Our college computer technology team developed a way for an urgent message to be transmitted to student and staff computer screens across campus, and appear on top of whatever is on the screen.

- Speakerphone broadcast. We've also discovered a way to use office telephones equipped with a speakerphone as a kind of public address message system. Our phone system is old by current standards, so it doesn't have the power to send a message to all phones at once. But we worked around that capacity challenge by developing several speakerphone "trees" that reach into buildings across the entire campus. Even if only one "tree" is activated, a message can reach all "corners" of the college.

- External public address system. We have tested and will purchase outdoor speaker units that are capable of delivering a verbal message or a tone/siren warning. This system also will be able to reach people across the campus.

No one likes to "think about the unthinkable," but at South we're working to improve our ability to respond to possible emergencies, and maintain a safe campus for our students and staff.

Dr. Jill Wakefield is president of South Seattle Community College and may be reached via wseditor@robinsonnews.com