Increase Campus Safety at Your School this Semester
- Aug 23, 2016
The Campus Safety Challenge
Each year, campus safety becomes a more and more important aspect of college and university life. With an unfortunate number of increasing violent, sports-related and weather emergencies putting universities at risk, it’s imperative that campus emergency management exhaust all options when it comes to protecting everyone on campus. Safety is now a top concern of both parents and students when finding the right campus until the day the students graduate.
As students begin filling college and university residence halls for a new semester, campus emergency management personnel must already be at work, preparing to protect them from a multitude of possible emergency situations. Preparing your campus to protect not only students, but faculty and visitors as well, is a never-ending challenge for campus emergency management teams.
Increasing Overall Campus Safety—Small Steps
There is no quick solution when it comes to taking on the challenge of campus safety, but directing efforts to a few core areas of improvement is a good place to start. Creating a safer campus environment requires assessing all campus lighting fixtures, doors and offering a constant reminder that campus officials are close by. Ensure good lighting around campus, both inside and outside, especially in parking lots, pathways, halls and lobbies. Providing heavy doors with good locks in both dorms and classrooms with help keep students and faculty safe during emergency situations where they need to keep someone out of the room.
While many schools also take part in the blue-light system, make sure to offer a campus hotline or number where students can call to report suspicious activity. Hiring more walking security also helps increase a sense of security around campus grounds.
Notify Your Campus
When there is an emergency, a good notification system for announcing emergencies is key in alerting everyone on campus. Text message and email alerts are perfect for not only sharing news of an incident but also providing instructions and updates to students and faculty to ensure they are as safe as possible in the aftermath of the emergency. Another key alerting system all campuses should have is proper alarms and sirens for break-ins as well as lightning strikes.
Campuses, both large and small, are at risk for a cloud-to-ground lightning strike every time electrical activity is detected in the air. Although not a major killer on campus grounds, lightning strikes cannot afford to be forgotten when increasing campus security. A good system that can detect total lightning; or the combination of both in-cloud and cloud-to-ground lightning so that sirens or horns can sound long before a threat is present.
Keeping your campus safe this semester is an on-going battle. Give yourself an advantage by making sure you create a safer campus environment, hire more walking security and deploy a reliable notification system both electronically and on-campus.