It’s always good to feel safe when you are away from home at a college university.
This week at the ETSU Student Government Association meeting, the biggest topic was campus safety. The meeting consisted of a public forum, where people could address the topic of safety on campus.
“I looked around our campus, and I saw the fact that there’s not enough security cameras,” speaker Jordan Rowe said. “It’s issues like this that can be resolved. It took 41 minutes to find a guy with a shovel on our campus.”
Police Chief of the Department of Public Safety Nicole Collins addressed the SGA about some of the concerns that have been raised since the lockdown on August 27.
“I had six officers on scene searching the interior of this campus,” Collins said. “I had one on exterior patrol and one officer helping out dispatch. I myself was on the incident command out of Burgin-Dossett.”
Since the incident, many concerns have been raised about the safety procedures on campus.
“What we did learn from this is that some of you probably didn’t hear the message clearly,” Collins said. “The sirens went off, but you couldn’t hear what was being said. We’re working on that.”
Emergency Management Specialist Andrew Worley addressed some of the concerns with safety in campus buildings.
“There is a project going on currently that will go through the rest of the semester,” Worley said. “We’re spending over $200,000 to make sure that every academic space on campus has the ability to be locked.”
ETSU SGA Senator Seth Utsman found the perspective of Collins and Worley to be very insightful.
“We were able to get a professional perspective on a lot of questions that have been raised, especially with the recent event on campus,” Utsman said. “I feel like that was one of the most informative and one of the best open forums we’ve had. I feel like we got good answers to the questions we did ask, and I feel like we asked most of the big questions.”
