Office of Public Safety plans for the future

Last January, the Office of Public Safety implemented their first active shooter drill on the Saint Joseph’s University campus.

The drill was not in response to a specific event, but was used as a practice on campus as preparation for students, staff, and faculty.

Some of the initial issues that Public Safety discovered after the drill were problems with the emergency notification system and the classroom telephone systems, according to Michael A. Boykin, assistant director and administrator of Public Safety.

“The next step in this is to look at a small geographic, whether it is by building, by organization… We are still in those formulating stages,” Boykin said.

Boykin, along with the new director of Public Safety and Security, Arthur Grover, is continuing to work on improving the protocol from the last drill, in order to make the next one more effective.

“We have been engaged in updating the emergency plan and we have a plan to build off of the drill that was managed last year, to have other drills going forward to be more specific as to certain areas of the campus,” Grover said. “We’re going to drill down and be more specific as to buildings and areas of the campus for future activities in this regard.”

While a practice active shooter drill is planned for the near future, there is no set date for the next drill.

“Of course it has to be ongoing,” Boykin said. “There is no way we can say we are going to do this once a month, because it takes a lot, and of course the disruption piece. We have to remember, we don’t want to be disruptive to the academic process, and when you do those kind of drills, it is very disruptive.”

Grover also noted that active shooter drills are only one part of the emergency management system and the response system at St. Joe’s.

“We do a whole lot of things that are less obvious that dovetail with these drills and this particular drill. For example, every month, we have a test of our emergency communications system, text messages, emails, etc.,” Grover said.

Grover and Boykin both state that educating students and faculty about situations and preparing them beforehand would be the preventative way to ensure safety and to stay as ready as possible for emergency situations.

“We can only make sure that they are educated and do drills to get them familiar with actually doing what is supposed to be done,” Boykin added. “And that is the purpose of the drills, also. To get people used to doing exactly what they should do in an emergency situation so that when a true emergency comes, there is not a panic situation.”

Kiera Kelly, ’19, was one of the students who was in class during last year’s active shooter drill.

“We used to have similar drills in high school, but I never thought about these types of situations happening,” Kelly said. “It reminded me that in this day and age that these things can happen anywhere and to always be aware of your surroundings and know where to hide if anything should happen.”

Although the drill was able to prepare Kelly if an incident were to arise, she still thinks that more could be done to make sure students feel safe.

“Maybe having Public Safety walk to the different classrooms and make sure everybody is accounted for and check to see if there is anything that the professor couldn’t handle that they would be able to help out with,” Kelly said.

Boykin also encouraged members of the St. Joe’s community to watch the videos provided on the Public Safety website that explain what to do if an active shooter were to be present on campus.

“The campus is made for a learning process, an educational process. It wasn’t built for securing everybody, ensuring that they are safe from an active shooter, because, within the past 10 years or so, this is now becoming an issue for the secondary educational institutions where you have to start thinking about these things,” Boykin said. “So these are the things that the drills are providing us and ensuring that we have a mechanism of evaluating what we have, a way to ensure that it is providing the most effective thing for the community.”