According to the results of a new survey, colleges and universities have made great strides when it comes to improving emergency preparedness, however, many institutions are still not adequately prepared for wide range of threats facing their campuses.
The “2015 Campus Safety Survey” conducted by security consulting firm Margolis Healy, which polled over 500 people serving in public safety and administrative roles at campuses across the U.S., found that the overwhelming majority of respondents, 86 percent, had an emergency operations plan in place at their institution that addressed threats and hazards specific to their facility. However, only 55 percent said that their university had conducted a comprehensive hazard and vulnerability assessment necessary for all-hazards emergency planning. More than a quarter of respondents said they had never conducted such an assessment.
While having some kind of emergency operations plan is good, Dan Pascale, senior director of security and emergency management services at Margolis Healy, believes more colleges and universities should be conducting vulnerability assessments that address threats specific to their facility.
“Overall, it looks like the trend continues to be that schools are certainly engaged in the emergency preparedness planning process, now we would like to see some more fine-tuning,” said Pascale. “We feel that it is really important to understand the threats you face and while plans now are all-hazard, that’s obviously the direction that we’ve been moving for a number of years, and we encourage all-hazards planning, we also need to know the individual threats institutions are likely to face. A number of factors drive that, whether it is geography, demography, topography, all of those influence the types of event you have to worry about. If I’m a school on the West Coast, I’m probably going to be worried about things like earthquakes. If I’m a school in the Midwest, let’s say somewhere like Oklahoma, I’m going to be worried about a tornado.”
Another area in which colleges were found to be lacking was is in their preparations for dealing with active shooters. Just last month, nine people were killed and nine others were injured when a gunman opened fire on the campus of Umpqua Community College in Oregon. Despite the deadly potential of these incidents, just over a quarter of survey respondents reported that they had never conducted any type of active shooter exercise on campus. The primary reason cited for not doing so was budget constraints, however, Pascale said there are several low cost options schools should be looking into to address this risk.
“Number one is to sit down and really have the key stakeholders at your institution get together and start a conversation about where are we today, what is our preparedness level, what are our plans, how do we respond, what is our mutual aid, what is our communication process, and all of the questions that surround your typical plan. That’s no cost, those are just good planning tactics that schools should be using,” he explained. “Second is engaging in exercises. Tabletop exercises are low stress, no fault environments that allow school administrators and, potentially, local first responders or their first responders, the opportunity to walkthrough those scenarios, making changes where necessary and they can be as little as 20-minute conversations or as long as several hours. They are very convenient and they provide a lot of education and a lot of lessons learned afterwards.”
In addition, just under half of those surveyed reported that their institution conducts routine post-event meetings with their emergency preparedness personnel following a significant emergency incident on another U.S. campus. That begs the question; how can a school address potential gaps in their own emergency plans if they are not taking lessons learned from other incidents and applying them to their own campus?
“We truly think that after action reports are as valuable as conducting exercises or large events themselves,” said Pascale. “When we identify lessons learned, it’s critical that we not just identify them but that we document them and understand how our plan could be altered or changed so that in the future we close those gaps.”
And while social media monitoring and the ability to detect threats before they materialize on school grounds has gained a lot of attention recently, just under 68 percent of those surveyed said that their institution continues to monitor social media feeds using manual methods and only eight percent are using social media alert software or contracting with a social media monitoring company.
“I feel like the ability to assess and monitor social media is a critical aspect and it is really dominating how students communicate these days,” said Pascale. “I do see that the ability to assess social media will become a tool in many institutions’ toolboxes.”
According to Pascale, the buy-in for developing emergency plans from the top-down on higher education campuses has greatly increased over the past decade and schools have subsequently improved their emergency and mass notification capabilities during that same time span. Among some of the things Pascale believes colleges need to improve upon moving forward in addition to the aforementioned issues are better resource allocation – both people and technology – for emergency planning on campuses, as well as actually drilling and training on plans that are in place.
“Overall, institutions of higher learning have made really great strides,” he added. “I was a director of emergency management at an institute of higher education during Virginia Tech and subsequent to that until 2012, so I was there when some of these critical incidents happened and I would say we have made really good strides, but it is something that must be addressed by institutions continually and not be put on a backburner even though there are tons of competing priorities. We can’t sit back, we can’t fall back into a pattern of calmness or complacency between emergencies, and it’s something that we have to be proactive with.”
