When I first started working in higher ed, it was during the time of people going "postal" - letter carriers and the like had a way of shooting up their offices. I thought my choice in employment would be utterly free of such travesty, projecting my experience on the entire college-going population "How could anything ever go wrong? It's such a happy time!" Sure was nice to be naive.
For as long as I've worked in higher ed - 15 years, nearly to the day - I've noticed that students seem a little more squirrelly and crazy. Long before Columbine and Virginia Tech students seem just a little more on edge. They twitch a little more. Heck, I do too. For me, my focus is gone. Projects that normally come easily become painstakingly difficult. And I tend to suffer fools just a little less patiently. And I can't attribute it to the end of the semester, either. Working in a for-profit college where April fell in the first half of a trimester, students were just a little wonky. Working at a college with a traditional agrarian calendar enhances it a little.
Fast forward a few years, and it's hard not to notice the April pattern. It's like one long, not-so-funny April Fool's joke. And it's ex-hausting. Waco. Oklahoma City. Columbine. Virginia Tech. Lone Star (x2). Another in Virginia. Boston... All presumably the work of one or two madmen, carried out on their own, without the help of thousands of followers to do the dirty work. And it's frightening to think how those few handful of men have shaped how we think and act on a larger scale - at least for those of us in education.
The hardest one for me to wrap my brain around was Virginia Tech, I distinctly remember sitting in he parking lot at lunch time at a relatively new job. I hadn't made a lot of friends yet, and so the radio was my usual dining companion. I remember being SO distraught that I just couldn't really function for the rest of the day. So now I try to manage the input.
I always try to think of where I'd go and what I'd do if there was an active shooter on campus. In the places I frequent most, I have an exit strategy or a hide strategy. Given the cavernous nature of some parts of our building, running like hell works best. In other parts, there are places in the building few know exist. And I'm liking the odds for those locations.
But it can't just be about me. That's the tricky part. Our building is literally crazy. I've surprised some people when I've told them how many sets of stairs we have - they only see the main one but we have two more that are nestled away. Good thing we haven't had a fire. And today, as one of our sister campuses in the district went on lock-down, I was troubled to learn that many of our faculty didn't know how to lock their classrooms. On the positive side, at least we were able to have these discussions ahead of time, to play out the scenario should something really happen. But I'm left to wonder how many other folks simply haven't considered the simplest steps of safety. And that doesn't even scratch the surface of our students. Bless them - earbuds crammed in, volume cranked to 11, looking down at their screens... a bullet could blaze their tower and they'd never notice. We've got to make sure they're safe too. No time for "What?" Just DO IT!!!!!
In a lot of the higher ed articles I'm reading lately, they're relying on college counselors to help identify and guide these students before they pull the trigger or a knife. It's going to take a lot more than just funding for more counselors. It's going to take consistency of instruction from faculty - our adjunct faculty are awesome and do a great job, but they aren't tied into the campus like full-time faculty are to know what services are available. Further, if students ended up having to take full-time faculty more frequently then those faculty would be more likely to talk to each other and relate concerns about students, simply because they're paid to be on campus, be on committees and know each other. But I'll leave it to Dean Dad over at Inside Higher Ed to talk about the merits of full-time faculty and cohesive campus cultures.
I often give our emergency management guys a hard time. Just last week one of them was giving me hell for going out to lunch when there was nickel-sized hail about 10 miles away. I don't envy their jobs - most of us blow off emergency management until something hits close to home. But I'm certainly glad we have some men who truly give a damn. They see danger where I see inconvenience. They see need for action where I see a quirky personality.
So with today's episode in our district, I can't think of any way they could have handled the situation better. There was an armed man on or near the campus. They locked the campus down to ensure students were safe. While surrounding police departments were not able to find the man but determined he was not close to the campus, they released all students for the remainder of the day. It's not ideal to lose that kind of class time, but it ensures safety for our students.
So here's to the unsung emergency management folks. They don't get the praise or glory that police officers and firefighters get, but they help to make sure that those police officers and fire fighters know what to do, how to do it and when.
April, I won't be sad to see you go.
No comments:
Post a Comment