|
CLARION PHOTO
Roger Price, vice president of Infrastructure Services, answer questions during a safety Forum,
from MATC staff and faculty, on Thursday, February 21.
CAMPUS SECURITY RESPONDS TO TRAGEDY IN ILLINOIS COLLEGE
Panel addresses
community concerns
By LINDSEY HINKEL
Clarion Managing Editor
As one of the people in charge of campus
security at MATC, Roger Price has
been asked the same question quite often
following the recent campus violence at
Northern Illinois University on Feb. 14.
“(What) I’ve been asked over the last
few days is, what do I do?” said Price, the
college’s vice president of infrastructure.
“What do I do if something happens? What
do I do if I hear something? What do I do if
I’m concerned about a colleague or a fellow
student or a staff member? What do I do?”
At a campus safety forum held at Truax
on Feb. 21, Price and other panelists
addressed student and staff concerns. He
told the 100-member audience that it’s difficult
to tell people exactly how to respond
to such a situation.
“We can’t tell you everything to do
because every situation will be different.
So it would be tough for us to answer that
question,” Price said.
Instead the college’s campus safety task
force provided the audience with a handout
with suggestions of what they might do if
violence were to happen on campus. The
handout and other information is available
on the college’s campus security web site at
http://matcmadison.edu/security. Some tips
include:
• If you’re in safe location, stay in the room
and secure the door.
• If the door has a window, cover it.
• Depending on the location of the suspect,
consider exiting through window openings.
• Move away from the incident, find safe
cover and wait for the police.
• Get out of sight of the door, stay quiet.
MATC’s safety task force has met regularly
since the fall semester to discuss a
report from the Governor’s Task Force on
Campus Safety and to examine MATC’s
needs.
Jackye Thomas, an employee development
coordinator at MATC, was on the
Governor’s Task Force and is helping the
college review its recommendations. She
read a paragraph from the Governor’s Task
Force Report at the MATC forum.
“Creating a culture of shared responsibility
for campus safety must become a
top priority,” she read. “An engaged community
armed with shared mindset, access
to information and effective mechanisms to
respond to threats before violence occurs is
a formidable force and one that will have an
immediate impact upon improving the overall
safety of our colleges and universities.”
Thomas said this means “we all need to
take responsibility for campus safety. We
need to become more literate about what
are risk factors, when should we report
things, what should we report, and where
should we go to report things. And those
mechanisms need to be simple and accessible
and clear to you and those are all things
we’re taking into account.”
Price said some changes have already
been made at the college. They include
reorganizing “how we approach security
and safety here at MATC,” offering additional
training for staff on how to anticipate and prevent incidents, and having 24/7 security office coverage on campus.
CLARION PHOTO
The MATC Safety Task Force meets with an audience of mainly staff and faculitty during a safety forum on
Thursday, February 21.
In addition, forum panelists addressed what individuals can do to make MATC a more safe environment.
“Oftentimes many of these situations can be dealt with before they escalate to that level,” said Keith Cornille, Dean of Learner Development. “What we want to do is build awareness that we do have things in place, procedures and code of conduct processes, that allow you to report what you feel you need to report. Sometimes you’re probably going to question yourself and think it’s probably nothing. If your instincts are telling you that you think you probably should tell somebody, then do it.”
Students are encouraged to contact the security office at (608) 243-4357 if they think someone is an immediate threat to themself or someone else. In the case of an emergency, call 9-1-1.
In less serious situations, Cornille said students can use the confidential service of the counseling office. The office offers both conflict management services and individual counseling. Students can contact the counseling office by calling (608) 246-6976. The college has eight counselors and one is on call at all times. The most important thing, Price said, is for people to be aware of their surroundings.
“We all learned to stop, drop and roll. Is that what it is? It’s been a long time since I was in third grade,” he said. “… We don’t have it down to three words. But I think it’s starting to get there. It’s critical that you know your surroundings. When you walk into the room, do you know what’s there that shouldn’t be there," said Price.
"Do you look around to see if something
is happening? Is someone acting differently than they’ve acted before. Check that out," he continued. "Be aware. …Any time you walk into a room, know your surroundings.”
He added that people should also anticipate how they should react and trust their instincts.
“Our work is not done,” Price said. “We don’t sit here to say we have all the plans in place to prevent anything. We don’t sit here to say that we have everything
in place exactly as we want them in place to respond to incidents. But we are further along and we are in a better place.” |
