[House Hearing, 110 Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
BEST PRACTICES FOR MAKING
COLLEGE CAMPUSES SAFE
=======================================================================
HEARING
before the
COMMITTEE ON
EDUCATION AND LABOR
U.S. House of Representatives
ONE HUNDRED TENTH CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION
__________
HEARING HELD IN WASHINGTON, DC, MAY 15, 2007
__________
Serial No. 110-36
__________
Printed for the use of the Committee on Education and Labor
Available on the Internet:
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______
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COMMITTEE ON EDUCATION AND LABOR
GEORGE MILLER, California, Chairman
Dale E. Kildee, Michigan, Vice Howard P. ``Buck'' McKeon,
Chairman California,
Donald M. Payne, New Jersey Ranking Minority Member
Robert E. Andrews, New Jersey Thomas E. Petri, Wisconsin
Robert C. ``Bobby'' Scott, Virginia Peter Hoekstra, Michigan
Lynn C. Woolsey, California Michael N. Castle, Delaware
Ruben Hinojosa, Texas Mark E. Souder, Indiana
Carolyn McCarthy, New York Vernon J. Ehlers, Michigan
John F. Tierney, Massachusetts Judy Biggert, Illinois
Dennis J. Kucinich, Ohio Todd Russell Platts, Pennsylvania
David Wu, Oregon Ric Keller, Florida
Rush D. Holt, New Jersey Joe Wilson, South Carolina
Susan A. Davis, California John Kline, Minnesota
Danny K. Davis, Illinois Cathy McMorris Rodgers, Washington
Raul M. Grijalva, Arizona Kenny Marchant, Texas
Timothy H. Bishop, New York Tom Price, Georgia
Linda T. Sanchez, California Luis G. Fortuno, Puerto Rico
John P. Sarbanes, Maryland Charles W. Boustany, Jr.,
Joe Sestak, Pennsylvania Louisiana
David Loebsack, Iowa Virginia Foxx, North Carolina
Mazie Hirono, Hawaii John R. ``Randy'' Kuhl, Jr., New
Jason Altmire, Pennsylvania York
John A. Yarmuth, Kentucky Rob Bishop, Utah
Phil Hare, Illinois David Davis, Tennessee
Yvette D. Clarke, New York Timothy Walberg, Michigan
Joe Courtney, Connecticut Dean Heller, Nevada
Carol Shea-Porter, New Hampshire
Mark Zuckerman, Staff Director
Vic Klatt, Minority Staff Director
C O N T E N T S
----------
Page
Hearing held on May 15, 2007..................................... 1
Statement of Members:
McKeon, Hon. Howard P. ``Buck,'' Senior Republican Member,
Committee on Education and Labor........................... 3
Prepared statement of.................................... 4
Miller, Hon. George, Chairman, Committee on Education and
Labor...................................................... 1
Prepared statement of.................................... 2
Statement of Witnesses:
Cornell, Dewey G., Ph.D., forensic clinical psychologist and
professor of education, director of the Virginia Youth
Violence Project, Curry School of Education, University of
Virginia................................................... 20
Prepared statement of.................................... 22
Healy, Steven J., president, International Association of
Campus Law Enforcement Administrators (IACLEA)............. 7
Prepared statement of.................................... 9
Attachment: Accreditation Standards and Critical Incident
Management............................................. 12
Kennedy, Louanne, Ph.D., emeritus provost and vice president
for academic affairs, Northridge, California State
University System.......................................... 13
Prepared statement of.................................... 16
Walbert, Janet E., Ed.D., president, National Association of
Student Personnel Administrators, vice president for
student affairs, Arcadia University........................ 25
Prepared statement of.................................... 27
BEST PRACTICES FOR MAKING
COLLEGE CAMPUSES SAFE
----------
Tuesday, May 15, 2007
U.S. House of Representatives
Committee on Education and Labor
Washington, DC
----------
The committee met, pursuant to call, at 10:00 a.m., in Room
2175, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. George Miller
[chairman of the committee] presiding.
Present: Representatives Miller, Kildee, Payne, Andrews,
Scott, Woolsey, Hinojosa, Tierney, Kucinich, Holt, Davis of
California, Davis of Illinois, Bishop of New York, Sestak,
Loebsack, Altmire, Yarmuth, Hare, Clarke, Courtney, McKeon,
Petri, Keller, Wilson, Kline, Boustany, Foxx, Kuhl, Davis of
Tennessee, Walberg and Heller.
Staff Present: Tylease Alli, Hearing Clerk; Denise Forte,
Director of Education Policy; Gabriella Gomez, Senior Education
Policy Advisor; Lloyd Horwich, Policy Advisor for Subcommittee
on Early Childhood, Elementary and Secondary Education; Lamont
Ivey, Staff Assistant, Education; Stephanie Moore, General
Counsel; Joe Novotny, Chief Clerk; Lisette Partelow, Staff
Assistant, Education; Rachel Racusen, Deputy Communications
Director; Julie Radocchia, Education Policy Advisor; Michele
Varnhagen, Labor Policy Director; Mark Zuckerman, Staff
Director; Robert Borden, Minority General Counsel; Kathryn
Bruns, Minority Legislative Assistant; Amy Jones, Minority
Professional Staff Member; Victor Klatt, Minority Staff
Director; Linda Stevens, Minority Chief Clerk/Assistant to the
General Counsel; and Sally Stroup, Minority Deputy Staff
Director.
Chairman Miller. The Committee on Education and Labor will
come to order. I want to welcome everyone this morning to
today's hearing on the best practices for making college
campuses safe.
Nearly a month has passed since the horrific violence of
Virginia Tech, by far the worst campus attack on our Nation's
history. It is extremely difficult to make sense of a tragedy
like this, and the unanswered questions about the events that
unfolded that day will undoubtedly persist for a long time.
Virginia Governor Tim Kaine has provided tremendous leadership
for the Virginia Tech community and for his State during this
painful and difficult time. The work of his Commission will
address the ongoing questions about the tragedy on the Virginia
Tech campus. We will look to the Commission's work for guidance
when it releases its recommendations.
The purpose of our hearing today is to learn from campus
safety advocates and school administrators about how the
Congress can help colleges and universities across the country
to prevent and recover from tragedies. On an emergency
preparedness front, we are particularly interested in learning
about emergency communications systems that use the latest
technologies. Many campuses use broadcast e-mails and text-
messaging systems that have proven to be effective in alerting
students and staff to emergency situations. Communication, as
we have learned, must include ways in which parents and loved
ones can receive updates and information about students and
staff on campus. The overall safety and emergency preparedness
plan is just part of the equation.
Detecting and preventing threats on the campus communities
are another part of the equation. Comprehensive mental health
counseling and intervention services can be incorporated into
the daily student life on campuses to help prevent the
individuals from acting on their emotions in a negative way. As
we will hear today, having the appropriate personnel for every
day of prevention services as well for the tragedies brings us
closer to ensuring a safer learning and working environment on
campus.
As we examine the state of campuses today, we must also
look at some of the more common and pervasive threats to
students--alcohol abuse and sexual assault. According to the
National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia
University, in 2001, more than 1,700 deaths on campuses were
caused by alcohol-related injuries. 97,000 students were
victims of alcohol-related rape and sexual assaults, and
696,000 students were assaulted by other students who had been
drinking heavily. The Federal statistics show that, in 2006,
there were more than 2,600 rapes reported by the students, a
figure that still may not show us the full picture of the
sexual assault trend, especially with these low reporting
rates.
Nothing is more important than the safety and well-being of
our children, our students and our loved ones. As the Virginia
Tech community continues to recover and heal from last month's
tragedy, the best service that we can provide to the students
and faculty and the staff members of colleges and universities
across the country is to first listen and learn. Then we must
decide what additional role the Federal Government, if any, can
play in better preparing the campuses to be safe.
We look forward to the testimony of our panel of witnesses,
and I would now like to recognize the senior Republican of our
committee, Mr. McKeon from California.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Miller follows:]
Prepared Statement of Hon. George Miller, Chairman, Committee on
Education and Labor
Welcome to today's hearing on ``Best Practices for Making College
Campuses Safe.''
Nearly a month has passed since the horrific violence at Virginia
Tech--by far the worst campus attack in our nation's history. It is
extremely difficult to make sense of a tragedy like this, and
unanswered questions about the events that unfolded that day will
undoubtedly persist for a long time.
Virginia Governor Tim Kaine has provided tremendous leadership for
the Virginia Tech community and for his state during this painful and
difficult time. The work of his commission will address the ongoing
questions about the tragedy on the Virginia Tech campus.
We will look to the commission's work for guidance when it releases
its recommendations.
The purpose of our hearing today is to learn from campus safety
advocates and school administrators about how the Congress can help
colleges and universities across the country to prevent and recover
from tragedies.
On the emergency preparedness front, we are particularly interested
in learning about emergency communications systems that use the latest
technologies.
Many campuses use broadcast emails and text-messaging systems that
have proven to be effective in alerting students and staff of emergency
situations.
Communications, as we have learned, must include a way for parents
or other loved ones to receive updates and information about students
or staff on campus.
The overall safety and emergency preparedness plan is just one part
of the equation. Detecting and preventing threats on a campus community
is the other part of the equation.
Comprehensive mental health counseling and intervention services
can be incorporated into daily student life on campuses, to help
prevent individuals from acting on their emotions in a negative way.
As we examine the state of safety on campuses today, we must also
look at some of the more common--and pervasive--threats to students:
alcohol abuse and sexual assault.
According to the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse
at Columbia University, in 2001, more than 1,700 deaths on campuses
were caused by alcohol related injuries; 97,000 students were victims
of alcohol-related rape or sexual assaults; and 696,000 students were
assaulted by another student who had been drinking heavily. And federal
statistics show that in 2006, there were more than 2,600 rapes reported
by students--a figure that still may not show us the full picture given
that sexual assaults tend to have especially low reporting rates.
Nothing is more important than the safety and well-being of our
children, our students, and our loved ones.
As the Virginia Tech community continues to recover and heal from
last month's tragedy, the best service we can provide to the students
and faculty and staff members of colleges and universities across this
country is to first listen and learn. Then we must decide what
additional role the federal government can play in better preparing
campuses to be safe.
We look forward to the testimony by our panel of witnesses.
I now recognize the committee's Senior Republican, Mr. McKeon, for
his opening remarks.
Thank you.
______
Mr. McKeon. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for convening today's
hearing.
It has been nearly a month since the deadliest shooting in
modern American history and, without a doubt, our Nation's most
unthinkable instance in campus violence. Families across the
country and the Virginia Tech community continue to grieve, and
we always will, but in the aftermath of that dark April day,
our challenge is to learn not only more about what occurred in
Blacksburg but also what we can do to ensure that college
campuses are well-equipped to handle tragedies such as this.
A response to an event of this magnitude, as all of us
would suspect, has been as swift as it has been broad. Local,
State and Federal law enforcement immediately engaged both for
the purposes of ensuring safety, but also to investigate the
sordid details of this sad case. Virginia's governor has
assembled a panel of experts to review every conceivable aspect
of the campus shooting, and colleges and universities have
begun to look inward, reexamining their own emergency response
plans.
Today, this committee has the opportunity to contribute to
the national dialogue on the safety of our college campuses as
well, and I thank our witnesses for joining us this morning to
help us to do just that.
At the outset, I believe it is important to note that this
is not a Republican or a Democrat issue. Rather, this is an
issue in which we all share feelings of anger, sorrow and, yes,
responsibility, not responsibility for what occurred in
Blacksburg on April 16th--the responsibility for that day's
events lies squarely with a single gunman, who acted selfishly,
brutally and without regard for human life--but responsibility
to join with other stakeholders to trigger a national
discussion on how to improve response efforts for the next time
an emergency situation occurs on a college campus.
The goal of today's hearing is straightforward, to listen
and to learn. As we organized our panel of witnesses and our
agenda, we made certain that our objective was not to advocate
or to dismiss a particular policy change or a piece of
legislation. Rather, we have assembled four men and women who
can share their unique perspectives on how to deal with
unexpected tragedies on college campuses. For example, I will
be eager to hear their thoughts on ways various departments
within institutions have coordinated an immediate response to
an on-campus incident.
What are campuses doing with regard to emergency
notification systems? What research is being done in the area
of threat assessments, and how have various campuses dealt with
unexpected tragedies?
In short, we are here to discuss with our panel the
question of whether there are certain standards or best
practices that could be followed for bolstering security and
emergency notification on campus. Because a campus security
office can take many forms and because campuses can vary from
small, one-building colleges to colleges that sprawl several
acres, to colleges that are in the middle of a bustling city,
trying to develop suggestions for standards that will fit all
different types of campuses is difficult. However, it is the
responsibility of all stakeholders to take on this challenge,
and this committee is no exception.
Mr. Chairman, with that in mind, I will look forward to our
witnesses' testimony.
[The prepared statement of Mr. McKeon follows:]
Prepared Statement of Hon. Howard P. ``Buck'' McKeon, Senior Republican
Member, Committee on Education and Labor
Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for convening today's hearing.
It's been nearly a month since the deadliest shooting in modern
American history and, without a doubt, our nation's most unthinkable
instance of campus violence. Families across the country and the
Virginia Tech community continue to grieve, and we always will. But in
the aftermath of that dark April day, our challenge is to learn not
only more about what occurred in Blacksburg, but also what we can do to
ensure college campuses are well-equipped to handle tragedies such as
this.
The response to an event of this magnitude, as all of us would
suspect, has been as swift as it has been broad. Local, state, and
federal law enforcement immediately engaged--both for the purposes of
ensuring safety, but also to investigate the sordid details of this sad
case. Virginia's Governor has assembled a panel of experts to review
every conceivable aspect of the campus shooting. And colleges and
universities have begun to look inward, re-examining their own
emergency response plans.
Today, this Committee has the opportunity to contribute to the
national dialogue on the safety of our college campuses as well, and I
thank our witnesses for joining us this morning to help us do just
that. At the outset, I believe it's important to note that this is not
a ``Republican'' or ``Democrat'' issue. Rather, this is an issue in
which we all share feelings of anger, sorrow, and--yes--responsibility.
Not responsibility for what occurred in Blacksburg on April 16th, as
the responsibility for that day's events lies squarely with a single
gunman, who acted selfishly, brutally, and without regard for human
life--but responsibility to join with other stakeholders to trigger a
national discussion on how to improve response efforts for the next
time an emergency situation occurs on a college campus.
The goal of today's hearing is straightforward: to listen and to
learn. As we organized our panel of witnesses and our agenda, we made
certain that our objective was not to advocate or dismiss a particular
policy change or piece of legislation. Rather, we have assembled four
men and women who can share their unique perspectives on how to deal
with unexpected tragedies on college campuses. For example, I'll be
eager to hear their thoughts on ways various departments within
institutions have coordinated in immediate response to an on-campus
incident; what campuses are doing with regard to emergency notification
systems; what research is being done in the area of threat assessments;
and how various campuses have dealt with unexpected tragedies.
In short, we're here to discuss with our panel the question of
whether there are certain standards--or ``best practices ``--that could
be followed for bolstering security and emergency notification on
campus. Because a campus security office can take many forms and
because campuses can vary from small, one-building colleges, to
colleges that sprawl several acres, to colleges that are in the middle
of a bustling city, trying to develop suggestions for standards that
will fit all different types of campuses is difficult. However, it is
the responsibility of all stakeholders to take on this challenge--and
this Committee is no exception.
Mr. Chairman, with that in mind, I look forward to our witnesses'
testimony.
______
Chairman Miller. Thank you very much.
I want to welcome all of the members of the panel. Thank
you for agreeing to give us your time and the benefits of your
experience and your knowledge.
I would like to turn to Mr. Scott for the purpose of
introducing Dr. Dewey Cornell.
Mr. Scott. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you for
allowing me to introduce Dr. Cornell from the University of
Virginia's Curry School of Education. I have worked closely
with Dr. Cornell on many issues over the years, and I am
pleased to see him testifying here today.
His testimony in this hearing is, unfortunately, relevant
today in the wake of the shootings at Virginia Tech on April
16th. Virginia Tech held its commencement ceremony this past
weekend, and although the physical and emotional scars from
this horrific day will continue to affect students and faculty
for a long time to come, I am hopeful that this is the first
step in restoring a sense of normalcy and healing to the
campus.
Dr. Cornell is a forensic clinical psychologist and a
professor of education at the Curry School. He is also a
director of the Virginia Youth Violence Project and a faculty
associate at the Institute of Law, Psychiatry and Public
Policy. He has 24 years of experience in evaluating juvenile
and adult offenders, including in the area of school shootings.
He has testified in legal proceedings, has consulted with the
FBI and has authored over 100 publications in psychology and
education on these matters.
From his work, Dr. Cornell has developed threat assessment
guidelines that are being used throughout Virginia as well as
in other States, and these guidelines are meant to assess the
actual threat of incidences in schools in order to help schools
evaluate the severity of threats and respond in a targeted and
appropriate manner.
He is widely respected in his field, and I would like to
thank him for traveling here today to provide testimony about
his work on school violence, and I look forward to hearing his
recommendations, and again, I thank Dr. Cornell.
I thank you, Chairman Miller, for the opportunity to
introduce him today.
Chairman Miller. Thank you.
Now, for the purposes of introducing Dr. Luanne Kennedy, we
have Mr. McKeon.
Mr. McKeon. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Dr. Luanne Kennedy served as Provost and Vice President of
Academic Affairs at California State University Northridge from
1993 until 2003. As Provost and Vice President, she was the
primary advisor to the president on all matters affecting
academic programming and was responsible for the campus in the
absence of the president.
When an earthquake struck Northridge, California in January
1994, Dr. Kennedy, the only senior administrator on campus that
weekend, guided the university through the early hours of the
disaster. The earthquake was only the second to strike directly
beneath an urban area since 1933, and it produced the strongest
ground motions ever instrumentally recorded in North America.
In those initial days, Dr. Kennedy accurately estimated the
number of emergency trailers needed to house the campus. She
was a forceful leader on campus in the weeks and months that
followed. That is when I first met her, and it was a wonderful
experience to see the inspirational leadership that she
provided at that time.
Before joining CSU Northridge, Dr. Kennedy served as
Associate Provost at Baruch College in the City University of
New York system and as Vice President for Academic Affairs at
Kean University of New Jersey. She also has served on numerous
community organizations and boards, including the regional and
corporate boards of the United Way of Los Angeles.
Mr. Chairman, it is my privilege to welcome Dr. Kennedy
this morning, and I look forward to hearing her perspective on
campus safety and emergency preparedness.
Chairman Miller. Thank you very much.
I have the honor of introducing Dr. Jan Walbert. Dr.
Walbert has served on various senior student affairs positions
at Arcadia University for 18 years. Currently, Dr. Walbert is
the Vice President of Student Affairs as well as President of
the National Association for Student Personnel Administrators,
the umbrella organization for Student Affairs Administrators,
representing over 11,000 members at 1,400 campuses. NASPA
members serve in a variety of functions and roles, including
the Vice President and Dean for Student Life as well as
professionals, working with housing and residence life, student
unions, student activities, counseling, career development,
orientation, enrollment management, racial and ethnic minority
support services, and retention and assessment.
Thank you very much for joining us, and we look forward to
your testimony. That is a pretty hefty portfolio there.
Congressman Holt wanted to be here to introduce Chief
Steven Healy, but he has been detained. So, if I might, I will
go ahead and just introduce Chief Healy to the committee.
Chief Healy currently serves as Director of Public Safety
at Princeton University. He is also the President of the
International Association of Campus Law Enforcement
Administrators, and it is in that capacity that Chief Healy
will be testifying before us today. Previously, Chief Healy
testified before the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs
Committee in April of this year.
Welcome to the committee. I think, Chief, we are going to
start with you.
The lighting system in the committee is such that when you
start testifying, the green light will go on, and then,
hopefully, an orange light will go on and warn you that you
have about a minute to wrap it up, and then the red light means
that you will be out of time, but we do allow you to finish a
coherent sentence and finish a thought and all of the rest of
that. So be comfortable in testifying in the manner that you
are most comfortable doing so.
STATEMENT OF STEVEN HEALY, PRESIDENT, INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION
OF CAMPUS LAW ENFORCEMENT ADMINISTRATORS, AND DIRECTOR,
DEPARTMENT OF PUBLIC SAFETY, PRINCETON UNIVERSITY
Mr. Healy. Yes, sir. I appreciate that.
Chairman Miller, Ranking Member McKeon, members of the
committee, my name is Steven Healy, and I am the Director of
Public Safety at Princeton University and am the President of
the International Association of Campus Law Enforcement
Administrators. IACLEA represents the campus public safety
executives at 1,100 institutions of higher education and over
1,800 individual members.
The tragic events at Virginia Tech nearly 1 month ago today
heightened the importance of our continuous efforts to enhance
campus public safety and to protect students, faculty, staff,
and visitors to our campus. I thank and commend the committee
for having this very important hearing.
This morning, I want to address several issues related to
campus public safety best practices, including mass
communication systems and other efforts that we have underway
to strengthen communications, initiatives to continually raise
the level of professionalism within the campus public safety
community, and ongoing efforts to meet Federal crime reporting
guidelines.
First, I want to assure this committee and the American
people that vigorous efforts are underway to enhance safety and
security on our Nation's campuses. With our partners such as
the International Association of the Chiefs of Police, College
and University Policing Section and several Federal agencies,
we are committed to protecting our campuses and maintaining the
open environment that is essential to the higher education
experience.
As you know, campuses are not immune from threats. We deal
with a number of health and safety risks, including high-risk
drinking, drug abuse, mental illness, suicide, and various
forms of violence against women, including sexual assault.
Campus public safety officers are on the front lines, along
with many other campus administrators, preventing, intervening
and responding to these situations. While there are no one-
size-fits-all solutions, ensuring that campus public safety
agencies meet high professional standards contributes to
effective prevention and response.
IACLEA recognizes that adherence to the highest
professional standards is crucial to our effectiveness. Thanks
to the Justice Department Office of Community-oriented Policing
Services, IACLEA has established an accreditation program based
on standards written by the Commission on Accreditation For Law
Enforcement Agencies. Our program requires participating
agencies to conduct an in-depth self-assessment and then to
meet over 225 standards, many of which are specific to the
campus environment. Accreditation sets a strong foundation as
agencies plan for other important aspects of campus safety,
such as communications, which must be dealt with in a holistic
manner.
First, we must communicate within our communities during
critical incidents to provide detailed instructions, control
rumors and maintain order. Second, we must also ensure
effective communications between all first responders.
Effective emergency notification systems must have the
appropriate capacity, security, redundancy, and reliability to
reach the community in multiple modes. These systems must use
voice messages, text messages, e-mails in addition to other
systems such as sirens and horns. No one method is sufficient.
We must combine all of these methods to ensure that we reach
the community. Effective communication and interoperability
between first responders is also paramount, and IACLEA has
received significant funding from the Department of Homeland
Security to enhance those responses.
In addition to ongoing challenges, colleges and
universities must also comply with the Federal Crime Awareness
and Campus Security Act of 1990, also known as the Clery Act.
The Clery Act impacts many areas of campus operations, so it is
important for campuses to take a collaborative approach to
compliance. To further this collaborative model, IACLEA has
joined with Security on Campus, an organization that works to
improve campus safety to offer a series of Clery Act training
sessions around the country. While many of these efforts have
enhanced campus public safety, it is important that we all
recognize that there is much more to do, and I offer the
following recommendations.
First is the need for a National Center For Campus Public
Safety. The need for a National Center For Campus Public Safety
was a consensus recommendation from a Justice Department-
sponsored summit held in 2004. The National Center would
support research, information-sharing, best in model practices,
and strategic planning to enhance safety and security.
In conclusion, IACLEA has worked for the past 49 years to
advance campus public safety and to support the more than
30,000 campus public safety officers serving our colleges and
universities. We firmly believe that campus public safety is a
shared responsibility that requires efforts from us all. Thank
you for your commitment to this important issue. Your continued
support is vital to our success and to our ability to maintain
our campuses as safe places. I appreciate the opportunity to
participate in this important dialogue, and I look forward to
your questions.
Chairman Miller. Thank you very much.
[The statement of Mr. Healy follows:]
Prepared Statement of Steven J. Healy, President, International
Association of Campus Law Enforcement Administrators (IACLEA)
Chairman Miller, Ranking Member McKeon, Members of the Committee.
My name is Steven Healy and I am the director of public safety at
Princeton University. I am also the President of the International
Association of Campus Law Enforcement Administrators (IACLEA), an
association that represents the campus public safety executives at
1,100 institutions of higher education and over 1,800 individual
members.
The tragic events at Virginia Tech nearly one month ago have
heightened the importance of our continuous efforts to enhance campus
public safety at more than 4,000 institutions of higher education
serving nearly 16 million students and millions more faculty, staff and
visitors. I thank and commend the Committee for holding this important
hearing on campus safety best practices.
I want to address several issues related to campus public safety
best practices, including on-going efforts to strengthen
communications, initiatives to continually raise the level of
professionalism within the campus public safety community and efforts
to comply with federal crime reporting requirements.
Before I outline these strategies, I want to assure this Committee
and the American people that vigorous efforts have been and continue to
be underway to enhance safety and security on our nation's campuses.
With our partners, such as the International Association of Chiefs of
Police, College and University Policing Section (IACP) and several
federal agencies, we are continuously vigilant and committed to
protecting our students and other community members while
simultaneously maintaining the open environment that is the centerpiece
of the American higher education experience.
It's important to understand the complex nature of our communities
and the evolving responsibilities of campus public safety.
Campuses are not immune from safety threats and other dangers
facing our society. We must be realistic about these threats and act
proactively to prevent and respond to the inevitable crises and
incidents that will arise. Campuses deal with a number of critical
challenges today, including problems with high risk drinking, drug
abuse, mental illness, including suicide, and various forms of violence
against women, including sexual assault. Campus public safety officers
are on the front lines, along with other campus administrators, as
first responders to many of these situations. As we work to develop
comprehensive, coordinated approaches to these, and other problems,
there is a growing convergence among fields about the best way to
prepare for and address complex health and safety issues on college
campuses. Rather than recommending one-size-fits-all solutions, both
alcohol, other drug and violence (AODV) prevention programs on the one
hand, and crisis planning models on the other, emphasize the need for
creating comprehensive plans that are tailored to the culture, setting,
and physical environment of each campus.
Essential steps in creating these plans include:
Working in partnerships with multiple campus and community
stakeholders;
Conducting an analysis of local problems, hazards,
structures, assets, and resources; and,
Consulting the research literature for and creating
evidence-based practices.
One way to ensure our colleges and universities are able to
prevent, prepare for, respond to, and recover from critical incidents
is by providing adequate resources for our campus public safety
agencies. These resources must include, as a foundation, the best
possible training available and support for adherence to the highest
professional standards.
Accreditation
IACLEA recognizes that training and professional standards are
crucial to our success in crime prevention and control and critical
incident response. Several years ago, we embarked upon a process to
establish an accreditation program for campus public safety agencies.
Thanks to our partners in the U.S. Department of Justice, Office of
Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS), IACLEA was provided seed
monies to begin developing this program. Based on the standards
previously established by the Commission on Accreditation of Law
Enforcement Agencies (CALEA), we now have a program that supports our
commitment to the professionalization of campus public safety.
Our Accreditation program requires participating agencies to
conduct an in-depth self-assessment of their policies and procedures
and then take significant steps to meet more than 150 campus-specific
standards. Some of those standards specifically address critical
incident response and we believe that the Accreditation process, in and
of itself, enhances an agency's response to all-hazards (see attached
article). IACLEA began accepting applications for the program last year
and we are confident that many colleges and universities will support
their campus public safety agencies seeking Accreditation.
Accreditation sets a strong foundation so agencies are able to plan
for other important aspects of campus safety such as communications.
Communicating for effective campus public safety involves several
inter-connecting spheres of communication and must be approached in a
holistic manner.
Communications
First and foremost, we must communicate within our campus
communities immediately following the discovery of a critical incident
so we are able to provide detailed instructions, maintain order, and
control rumors. Secondly, we must communicate with those responsible
for managing and resolving a critical incident: the emergency first
responders. For the former, our strategy must consider the unique
characteristics of campuses and the fact that we are open, vibrant,
active communities, with people always on the move, engaging in
academic, social and other activities.
Of particular interest is the need for mass, emergency notification
systems that have appropriate capacity, security, redundancy and
reliance to reach our community members using multiple forms of
communication that do not allow for a single point of failure. These
systems must be able to reach community members with voice messages,
text messages and emails, in addition to other systems that may already
be in place, such as web sites, horns, or sirens. No single method of
communication is sufficient.
Secondly, we must communicate effectively with our emergency
response partners. This type of communication requires
interoperability--that is, equipment, protocols and governance
structures that allow agencies to speak to each other in real time.
Funding provided by Congress through the U.S. Department of Homeland
Security and the U.S. Department of Justice aims to enhance
interoperability at several levels, yet colleges and universities are
not explicitly mentioned as potential grant recipients for this
funding. Specifically including campus public safety agencies in
existing federal and state programs of emergency preparedness and law
enforcement response would address the varying capabilities of campuses
to talk to their counterparts in the larger community during critical
incidents.
While interoperable equipment is important, so is the need to have
established systems, protocols, agreements, and joint training programs
that enable multiple agencies to respond in a rapid, effective,
seamless fashion. With the support of a U.S. Department of Homeland
Security grant, IACLEA created a ``Guide to Strengthening
Communications between Campus Public Safety Departments and Federal-
State-Local Emergency Response Agencies''. This Guide recommends that
campuses do the following:
Assess local responsibilities and resources available;
Determine the state of local emergency communications
equipment and training and make recommendations for improvements;
Develop and maintain a written Emergency Communication
Plan that is consistent with federal NIMS/ICS requirements;
Develop mutual aid agreements and/or memoranda of
understanding in cooperation with local law enforcement and other
emergency response agencies;
Train and conduct exercises to validate, enhance, or
improve all procedures resulting from developed mutual aid agreements;
and,
Develop and improve communications skills and networks.
To support these goals, IACLEA, with funding from DHS, developed a
critical incident management course that involves simulation based
training. In its first year of operation, the program has trained more
than 700 campus public safety officers and their emergency response
partners.
In addition to the on-going challenges of crime prevention, crime
control, and critical incident response, colleges and universities must
ensure they comply with Federal crime reporting requirements,
specifically, the Crime Awareness and Campus Security Act of 1990,
known as the Clery Act.
Clery Act Compliance
The Act requires colleges and universities that receive federal
Title IV funding to disclose campus crime statistics and crime
prevention information to the public and the Federal government. IACLEA
has served as a resource to the U.S. Department of Education by
providing feedback on changes to the Clery Act and training for our
members. IACLEA has co-sponsored a number of Clery Act training and
compliance workshops and seminars at our Annual Conference, Regional
Conferences and other venues.
The Jeanne Clery Act impacts many areas of campus operations and
administration; therefore, it is important for colleges and
universities to take a collaborative approach to compliance. To further
the collaborative model, this year, Security on Campus, an organization
devoted to improving campus safety, teamed with IACLEA and the IACP
under grant funding from the U.S. Departments of Justice and Education,
to offer a series of Clery Act compliance training sessions across the
U.S. IACLEA is providing subject matter expert instructors for these
courses.
The Clery Act provides students and their families with accurate,
complete and timely information about safety on campus, so they can
make informed decisions about their safety and security. Our job as the
professional association representing campus public safety is to
provide our members with the latest training and guidance so they can
deliver this information to students, parents and the Federal
government. IACLEA is committed to working with our members and with
other interested groups to promote Clery Act compliance and training in
the future.
IACLEA believes that a current proposal to expand the Clery Act to
include additional reporting requirements under a broad definition of
``campus law enforcement emergencies,'' while well intended, is far too
subjective and contains a number of problematic requirements. We have
submitted alternative language for this bill and stand ready to assist
the U.S. Congress in enhancing campus public safety.
Summary
Providing adequate safety and security for our nation's campuses is
a critical responsibility that requires action by all of us. Campuses
are diverse settings, and there is no one-size-fits-all initiative that
will work at every institution. Each campus must undertake a
comprehensive planning process involving multiple campus and community
constituencies, working together to analyze their local problems and
assets and developing plans that use multiple, coordinated policies,
protocols, and programs. IACLEA has developed several resources that
can significantly contribute to these efforts, but we can do more with
additional support from the Federal government.
While these existing efforts by IACLEA and other professional
associations and our partners in the Federal government lay important
groundwork, they should be supplemented to ensure they are:
Expanded to all campuses;
Include more partners on campus, as well as local and
state partners;
Supported with funding for appropriate equipment and other
infrastructure development;
Informed by training, technical assistance, and up-to-date
information; and,
Practiced regularly on all campuses.
Recommendations
While IACLEA currently reaches nearly half the traditional higher
education institutions, we need to ensure all colleges and universities
are committed to and have access to high quality information, best
practices, and training. Greater Federal, state and local support for
campus public safety agencies--both at public or private institutions--
would provide additional opportunities.
First among my recommendations is the need to establish a National
Center for Campus Public Safety. The need for a National Center was a
consensus recommendation from a Summit held in 2004. The National
Center would support research, information sharing, best and model
practices, and strategic planning to enhance campus public safety.
For example, in the aftermath of the horrific events at Virginia
Tech on April 16, many campuses began examining mass notification
systems. Unfortunately, there was little information available to help
guide those decisions. A National Center would fill that gap by
brokering innovative, forward-looking research for campus public safety
needs. The National Center would also aggressively promote the adoption
of professional standards, like those in the IACLEA Accreditation
Program. The Center would be an invaluable resource for all who have a
stake in campus public safety and thus the success of our colleges and
universities.
Secondly, we are working with our partners in the FBI, the U.S.
Secret Service, and the Department of Education to expand previous
studies of middle and high school aged shooters, to take a deliberate,
campus-focused look at rampage shooting incidents at colleges and
universities. This examination and the lessons learned from it will
surely result in the identification of best practices. I would like to
thank the FBI Office of Law Enforcement Coordination for facilitating
this important initiative.
Finally, IACLEA will work with the national associations of higher
education and other partners to adopt a four-point risk management
strategy that we believe may help us prevent future tragedies:
Aggressively promote the use of IACLEA's Threat & Risk
Assessment tool, developed with federal DHS grant support, to help
campuses identify and prioritize vulnerabilities tied to known and
potential threats. For this, IACLEA will need additional resources from
DHS beyond what our current grant allows.
Collaborate with others to create behavioral threat
assessment models. These models should be centered on multi-
disciplinary teams, comprised of student affairs professionals,
counselors and psychologists, substance abuse professionals, and campus
public safety administrators working together.
Fast track our efforts to develop a comprehensive tool to
assist campuses in evaluating their physical security environments.
This tool will help campuses make sound decisions about security
technology and mass notification systems.
Ensure that rapid response training is available to
campuses that need it. The Bureau of Justice Assistance has pledged
their help in this important endeavor.
We believe this four-point approach addresses potential gaps that
may exist on some campuses and establishes a framework to
systematically address other safety and security challenges on our
campuses.
Conclusion
For the past 49 years, IACLEA has worked to advance campus public
safety. We understand the vital role our colleges and universities play
in ensuring democracy throughout the world. We will continue to be an
advocate for the more than 30,000 public safety officers serving over
4,000 unique communities. Advancing campus public safety is a shared
responsibility and requires efforts from all of us. We must all work to
ensure we eliminate the fragmentation and isolation of campus safety
initiatives and adopt only those activities that are founded in
evidence-based best practices.
Thank you for your commitment to this important issue. I would also
like to thank DHS, the FBI, the Justice Department and the Department
of Education for their support, along with the many state and local
agencies, who are our partners. These partnerships are vital to
fulfilling our promise to ensure that every campus community remains
safe and open.
I appreciate the opportunity to contribute to this important and
ongoing dialogue.
Attachment
Accreditation Standards and Critical Incident Management
Recent occurrences in the United States and Canada have underscored
the potential for catastrophic events on college and university
campuses. Whether man-made, natural or technological in nature,
catastrophic events present unique challenges to those responsible for
the well-being of students, faculty, staff and visitors. Events such as
Hurricane Katrina, in the fall of 2005, illustrate the potential for
catastrophes to reach far beyond geopolitical boundaries and render
great swaths of infrastructure inoperable. The tragic shootings at
Dawson College in Montreal and more recently, at Virginia Tech,
demonstrate the sudden, unpredictable, and devastating nature of some
criminal acts. These events point out the need for seamless emergency
operations procedures at institutional, municipal, regional, state, and
national levels. Effective, large-scale emergency operations can only
occur after careful consideration and planning have taken place at each
level.
IACLEA's efforts to launch an accreditation program began in 1999.
IACLEA conducted a member needs assessment survey, which identified the
development of a campus public safety agency accreditation process as a
priority. The Association created an Accreditation Committee in 2001
and charged it with reviewing existing standards and developing an
accreditation process. In 2003, IACLEA sought and was awarded a grant
from the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) within
the U. S. Department of Justice. These funds were designed to defray
the start-up costs of creating and implementing the accreditation
program. A second COPS grant was secured in 2005 to continue the
support of the program through the pilot program phase. The IACLEA
Accreditation Program was officially launched in February 2006.
The Accreditation Committee, recently reformulated as a Commission,
is the Association's governing body for the IACLEA Accreditation
Program. The Commission consists of twelve voluntary members, nine of
which are IACLEA members. Particular care is taken to ensure that the
Commission membership is representative of the diversity of the
Association, including representatives of both two- and four-year
institutions, sworn and non-sworn agencies, and public and private
institutions. Additional members are drawn from allied associations,
including the National Association of College and University Business
Officers, the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators,
and the American Council on Education.
An often cited benefit of the accreditation process is that the
standards provide timely and topical guidance in the ``best practices''
of public safety management and operations. The standards address areas
such as policy development, selection of personnel, training,
discipline, use of force, patrol and traffic operations,
communications, record keeping, property and evidence handling,
transportation and detention of individuals, and emergency response
planning.
Generally, the standards identify ``what'' an agency must do, not
``how'' to do it. The majority of standards require a ``written
directive'' as a proof of compliance to affirm the agency's commitment
to the standard. Generally, any document that is binding on agency
personnel and serves to direct, guide, or govern their activities may
be used to meet the written directive requirement. The following
standard, addressing emergency response planning, requires a written
plan:
46.1.2 The agency has a written ``All Hazard'' plan for responding
to critical incidents such as natural and man-made disasters, civil
disturbances, mass arrests, bomb threats, hostage/barricaded person
situations, acts of terrorism, and other unusual incidents. The plan
will follow standard Incident Command System (ICS) protocols, which
include functional provisions for: command, operations, planning,
logistics, and finance/administration.\1\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\1\ CALEA, Standards for Law Enforcement Agencies, 5th Edition,
Fairfax, VA
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Subsequent standards provide more specific direction concerning the
development of a comprehensive and effective emergency operations plan.
It is noted that the ``command function'' should address issues such as
establishing a command post, mobilizing personnel, preparing a staging
area, requesting outside assistance, and maintaining media relations.
The ``operations function'' should attend to establishing perimeters,
conducting evacuations, controlling traffic, and providing on-scene
security. The ``planning function'' should address preparing an
incident action plan, collecting and disseminating intelligence, and
planning for demobilization, while the ``logistics function'' should
concentrate on communications, transportation, medical support, and
equipment and supplies. The standards also require the periodic
inspection of the agency's emergency response equipment to ensure its
operational readiness.
Not only does the IACLEA Accreditation Program promote the highest
professional standards for campus law enforcement and protective
services, but it is committed to enhancing critical incident management
through the creation of a web-based Campus Preparedness Resource
Center. Funded under a federal Department of Homeland Security grant,
the goals of the web based Resource Center are to develop and
disseminate resources to strengthen the capacity of campus public
safety departments to plan for potential WMD/terrorist threats, to
encourage participation in IACLEA's Incident Command System training
program, and to disseminate a strategic vision for campus public safety
training. Among the online resources available to the members of the
campus public safety profession is a ``Model Campus Emergency
Operations Plan Guidelines'' resource, which offers a sample EOP,
emergency support functions and incident specific appendices and other
sample documents that may be edited and adapted for use at any
institution. This guide can provide a framework to develop an effective
and compliant ``All Hazard'' plan.
______
Chairman Miller. Dr. Kennedy.
STATEMENT OF LOUANNE KENNEDY, FORMER PROVOST, CALIFORNIA STATE
UNIVERSITY AT NORTHRIDGE
Ms. Kennedy. Chairman Miller, Ranking Member McKeon and
members of the committee, on behalf of the California State
University, I want to thank you for inviting me to discuss
campus emergency preparedness and response. I am going to focus
on the events of the early days of the Northridge earthquake
and also on the school's recovery from the event and the
changes that we made to emergency preparedness as a result of
that event. First, I would just like to say a few words about
the CSU.
We are the largest and most diverse 4-year university
system in the country with 23 campuses, about 417,000 students,
and we range from the northern area of California to the south.
We have awarded about 2 million degrees, and we are also very
cost-effective. Our charges average about $3,200 a year. Cal
State Northridge is a campus now of 30,000 students on 369
acres.
On January 17th, 1994, the northwest area of Los Angeles,
including our campus, was struck by a 6.7-magnitude earthquake.
Damage to the area is estimated at around $40 billion. Our
campus was located about a mile from the epicenter and incurred
about $400 million in damages. The casualties from the quake
were relatively minor given the hour of the day, 4:31 in the
morning, and the fact that it was the Martin Luther King
holiday and that the students were not on the campus. The
earthquake resulted in damage to 107 of the 117 buildings.
Seven of those buildings were totally destroyed.
For almost a decade, the campus was engaged in teaching and
learning activities while simultaneously managing the recovery.
We built a temporary campus, coordinated the relocation of
classes and offices and worked closely with Federal and State
agencies and construction companies, and we opened 1 month
later, scheduling 5,000 classes in 400 trailers and 4 Mylark
10,000-square-foot domes. I would like to just talk for a
minute about the first day.
We had absolutely no information about what had happened to
us beyond a radio station's announcing that the earthquake was
in Northridge. What we were able to see, though, was that the
science buildings were in flames, that the structures had
separated from their main cores. We had no phones, no food, no
water, no sanitary facilities, and no safe structures. We had
hundreds of people coming to the campus from the outlying areas
because we were a place that people came to. Our first contact
was with the emergency response unit of the CSU. This contact
was by walkie-talkie. We also had one public phone that worked,
and we were in search of quarters for quite some time.
The two things we focused on were safety, to make sure that
all of the buildings--that we had gone into all of the
buildings to make sure no one was inside. This was a difficult
task. Since the freeways were down, we had only one person from
facilities, three public safety people, two people from student
affairs, and myself, because we lived on campus. So I had just
moved there from New York and was living in one of the dorms at
the time of the earthquake.
Our first task--once we had established safety and there
were no students in the buildings and we had everyone on the
fields in front of the public safety office, we then began to
photograph the entire campus. To continue to work on safety,
the chancellor's office sent us staff from other campuses and
made the decision that the first thing that had to happen was
we had to have telephones established in order that anyone who
would call the campus would reach a live person, and we
produced a common form, telling them updates on a daily basis.
We worked out of two army tents that had been provided for us.
The biggest difficulty that came was that we were
unfamiliar with the number of aftershocks that would occur. We
built a crisis management team out of the individuals who were
present. No matter what their titles or previous positions had
been, if they could man the phones, if they could operate in
any way, if they felt safe enough to go into buildings with
public safety people, we sent them in.
By the end of day 5, though, we determined that a temporary
campus would have to be built because there were 3,000
aftershocks in those early weeks, and buildings that we would
claim would be on line on day 1, on day 3, would be off or
sometimes between 10:00 and 4:00. With anyone who came onto the
campus, we held briefing meetings at 10:00 a.m. and 4:00 p.m.
We also prepared online telephone reports from student affairs,
academic affairs and administrative services so that our staff
and students could reach--even if they called through the
night, they would be able to reach some update for the day that
would talk about opening. Our message was that we would open.
We were not sure when, and we were not sure in what structures.
As administrators, we also agreed that we would be the last to
occupy permanent space and would not move out of our dorms and
trailers until every student had classrooms and every faculty
member had an office, and we kept that promise, and for the
next 8 years, the president and all of the senior
administrative officers worked out of these spaces. What I want
to talk about now is what we learned from that.
We did not have access to our emergency planning documents,
obviously, on the morning of the earthquake, and I must admit,
as the administrator in charge, it was sort of the last thing
on my mind. I think, in the moments like this, you think about
safety. You think about letting people know things, and you
want water, toilets and other objects like that; food would
have been helpful, too. We have now developed a detailed
emergency operations plan that anticipates and does practice,
mock events for different kinds of threats, both natural,
earthquakes, fire, flooding, hazardous materials, landslides,
windstorms, utility outages, and those that are caused by
accidental or intentional acts--a national defense emergency, a
terrorist attack, aircraft bombs. We have a special plan for
the avian flu, acts of violence, a shooting attack or a
disturbance by criminal or insane individuals. This plan is
updated and reviewed annually, and the university regularly
conducts training and exercises.
Chairman Miller. Dr. Kennedy, I would ask if you could wrap
up your testimony.
Ms. Kennedy. Okay. Sure.
Chairman Miller. Thank you.
Ms. Kennedy. We have a functioning emergency broadcast
system on the main campus; we have redundancy in terms of the
emergency operations plans; we have a mobile unit and several
on-campus structures, and we recognize, however, that given our
own experience with this that it is almost impossible to plan
for every single event, but we have built into our activities
and our planning and our training both--we had former FEMA
Director James Lee Witt conduct vulnerability and disaster
assessments, including an active shooter scenario. We maintain
mutual aid agreements with local and state public agencies.
Unpredictability is inherent in disasters, and planning for
such events is a real challenge.
Thank you very much.
Chairman Miller. Thank you.
[The statement of Ms. Kennedy follows:]
Prepared Statement of Louanne Kennedy, Ph.D., Emeritus Provost and Vice
President for Academic Affairs CSU, Northridge, California State
University System
Introduction
Chairman Miller, Ranking Member McKeon, and members of the
Committee, on behalf of the California State University (CSU) thank you
for inviting me to discuss campus emergency preparedness and response.
My testimony will focus on my experience as the Provost and Chief
Academic Officer of California State University Northridge (CSUN)
during the 1994 Northridge earthquake, the school's recovery from that
event, and the changes made to campus emergency response planning as a
result of the experience. But first, a few words about the CSU.
The California State University
Few, if any, university systems match the scope of the CSU. The CSU
is the largest and most diverse four-year university system in the
country, with 23 campuses, approximately 417,000 students and 46,000
faculty and staff. The CSU, stretching from Humboldt in the north to
San Diego in the south, is renowned for the quality of its teaching and
for its job-ready graduates. Since the system's creation in 1961, it
has awarded about two million degrees. We currently award approximately
84,000 degrees each year. One key feature of the CSU is its
affordability. For 2006-07, the CSU's systemwide fee for full-time
undergraduate students is $2,520. With individual campus fees added,
the CSU's total fees average $3,199, which is the lowest among any of
the comparison public institutions nationwide. And while each of the 23
CSU campuses has its own identity, with distinct student populations
and programs, all share the same mission--to provide high-quality,
affordable higher education to meet the changing workforce needs of the
people of California.
The 23 CSU campuses vary greatly in size and structure--from Cal
Maritime's 1,000 student cadet environment, to large urban campuses, to
more traditional mid-sized residential campus settings. Cal State
Northridge (1958) is the intellectual, economic and cultural heart of
the San Fernando Valley. One of California's largest universities, CSUN
each year educates more than 30,000 students and produces 6,000 highly
skilled graduates. The university's superb academic offerings spread
between 62 bachelor's and 50 master's degrees include teacher
preparation and undergraduate engineering programs ranked among the
nation's best. The university also hosts a new, on-campus ``learning
laboratory'' high school; a unique aquatic therapy center; and
exceptional programs in the performing arts, sciences and ethnic
studies. Northridge is a culturally and ethnically diverse university
focused on student-centered learning and success. Its 356-acre campus
in suburban northern Los Angeles offers a park-like setting with on-
campus housing for 2,200 students. Students enjoy a wide range of
support services and extracurricular activities, including more than
200 student clubs and organizations and an intercollegiate athletic
program with 20 teams.
The Northridge Earthquake
On January 17, 1994 at 4:31 a.m. the northwest area of Los Angeles,
including the campus of CSU Northridge, was struck by a 6.7 magnitude
earthquake. Damage to the area is estimated at more than $40 billion.
Thousands of aftershocks continued to devastate structures for weeks
after the major thrust.
California State University, Northridge located about a mile from
the epicenter incurred more than $400 million in damages. Overall
casualties from the quake were relatively minimal because of the time
of day. The campus was closed for break and January 17 was the Martin
Luther King holiday. At the time of the disaster, CSUN had 25,000
students and three thousand faculty and staff working in 117 buildings
on 356 acres. The earthquake resulted in damage to 107 of these
structures, seven of which required demolition. For almost a decade,
the campus was engaged in teaching and learning activities while
simultaneously managing the process of reconstruction.
The Chancellor's office Emergency Response Unit reached us by
walkie-talkie within a few hours of the event to offer assistance. On
the morning of January 17, there were very few public safety officers,
one Facilities staff, and a few campus and community members on campus.
We asked for additional public safety and facilities' staffs to check
each of the buildings to make certain no persons were trapped in any
structures. The chancellor's office was very helpful in providing
additional staff from other campuses to assist us and this support
continued through the years of recovery until the final funding sign-
off by FEMA in spring 2007.
We built a temporary campus, coordinated the relocation of classes
and offices and worked closely with construction companies and federal
and state agencies. My presentation today describes the steps taken to
reopen the campus four weeks after the earthquake on February 14,
scheduling 5000 classes in trailers, MYLAR domes, playing fields, and
borrowed space from local schools and universities. We had no library,
no science and engineering labs, no instruments for music or materials
for art classes--or the operating systems to access student records and
business processes critical to managing a university. Solutions for
each of these missing aspects of university life were found.
I will provide just a brief overview of the first day. We had
imperfect information yet decisions needed to be made. One of the
science buildings was in flames and several buildings were clearly
dangerous since sections had separated from their main structures.
Firefighters extinguished the fires in the science building but were
deployed away from this fire when called to fires where lives were at
risk. The fires reignited. Hazardous materials were exposed in two
other damaged science buildings. We had no phones, no food, no water,
no sanitary facilities and no safe structures. A severe limitation for
many key staff was their inability to access roads and highways to get
to campus. Faculty, staff and community members who were able to reach
campus gathered on the open fields. We used those faculty and staff,
regardless of their titles or previous roles, to begin the recovery and
to communicate our status. While continuing to assess the structures,
we began work to establish a communications center.
Communications: We needed to assure our students and staff that the
campus would reopen and classes would begin for the spring semester.
Yet all campus buildings were closed except to the professional staff
evaluating which buildings might be repaired and returned to use.
Exceptions were also made for individuals required to photograph and
record the damages. Some faculty were anxious to get into the buildings
to personally examine the damage to their offices and labs, an anxiety
that did not abate for some weeks. We operated in more of a ``command
and control'' structure than is usual in campus relations. The
administration was characterized as authoritarian by some who felt that
democratic decision making was a critical component of campus life and
must be maintained. We were unable to honor those views and maintain
safety and security.
With the help of the Chancellor's Office, CalState Dominguez Hills
Public Safety officers, and the CalState Fullerton telecommunications
staff, We had improved safety and operating phone connections on the
field outside the public safety office by mid-day on January 18. This
area became the new campus operations center. Two army tents arrived
with the phone connections and we developed scripts for staff operating
the phones. The aim was to make certain that anyone who called the
campus was connected to an individual who could answer questions and
convey as accurately as possible the status of our buildings. We
assured all callers that the campus would reopen. We would indicate the
status of buildings we believed could be used. These decisions were
based on reports of structural damage. We did not yet understand the
extent of damages that would result from the thousands of aftershocks.
Documenting the damages is a critical activity to ensure
reimbursement. Part of that filming included making a video ``Academic
Aftershocks'' demonstrating the week to week and month to month
progress over the first two years.
Building a Team for Recovery: A Crisis Management Team was formed,
made up of the president and senior campus officers and members of the
faculty who were experts in planning and who knew the campus geography.
The team held 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. briefings from each area: academic,
student, and administrative affairs. We were able to communicate now by
phone, established phone trees, and added these in person meetings for
some faculty and staff directly engaged in recovery efforts. Others
were asked not to come to campus. Taped messages were prepared
following the last update at 4 p.m. Individuals who called through the
night could access the latest summary information.
By the end of day five, we determined that a temporary campus was
the only way we could guarantee re-opening. Trying to build a schedule
on shifting soil was impossible. We imagined covering the current flat
parking areas with trailers, creating new parking, and acquiring 400
trailers and four 10,000 sq. ft. MYLAR domes. These decisions
eliminated the uncertainty created when buildings were listed as on-
line for use in the 10:00 a.m. meeting and, following aftershocks
sometimes as high as 5.5 on the Richter scale, were then taken off the
reopening plans at the 4:00 p.m. meetings. Classes were to begin
February 14. Local radio stations and newspapers added to our
communication network to get the word out to students that CSUN was
``Not Just Back . . . Better!'' Information booths were manned at all
entry points for the first day. Group and individual counseling was
made available for all faculty, students and staff and loans were made
to students who could not access their existing accounts.
Developing a schedule and arranging on-line registration involved
difficult and sometimes dangerous actions. With the aid of a cherry
picker, the Dean of Libraries and Information Services entered the
second floor window of the admissions and records area to retrieve
student files. When she and a colleague entered the second floor, a 5.5
aftershock hit the campus and that building in particular. The
retrieved files were flown to CSU Fresno and installed on their
computers. Admissions and Records staff working from their homes, in
campus domes, and at CSU, Fresno maintained the records, produced the
schedule and enabled students to register as though they were
connecting to CSU Northridge. CSU system effectiveness is apparent in
these successes.
Radio stations were regularly announcing our status and reopening
plans. President Clinton delivered a radio message to the campus. Vice
President Gore arrived earlier to assess the situation. On February 14,
twenty four-thousand students arrived for the first day of classes.
Opening Day It was a joyful and chaotic opening. The faculty were
highly creative in serving students in the areas where trailers were
nonexistent or not yet operational. The nonexistent trailer category
was the fate of the Business and Economics College. Selected for
placement on the fields used as the Command Center, the College's
trailers were delayed in placement. Faculty drove their cars adjacent
to the field and placed large placards in the window announcing the car
as the new Department Office. Other faculty used bullhorns to gather
students for class. For example, a scene on the film has a faculty
member shouting ``Accounting 401, Behind the Dumpster.'' Many classes
were held outdoors, though that was forced to end when the rains came.
All administrators agreed that we would be the last to occupy
permanent space and would not move out of our domes and trailers until
every faculty member had offices and student classrooms were rebuilt.
We kept that promise. For the next eight years, academic affairs' staff
worked in a 10,000 sq. ft. dome with neither walls nor windows. Student
and Administrative Affairs shared an adjacent dome. The President and
her staff worked from a trailer next to the domes. In fall 2002, the
senior administration moved into permanent space.
Current Practices for Improving College Campus Safety
The CSU system campuses all have detailed Emergency Operations
Plans (EOP). A summary of the CSUN plan is just one example. Cal State
Northridge has developed a detailed Emergency Operations Plan and
structure that anticipates different threats, both natural
(earthquakes, fire flooding, hazardous material's incidents,
landslides, windstorms and utility outages) and those that are caused
by accidental or intentional acts (national defense emergency, personal
medical emergency, terrorist attack, aircraft crash, bomb threat, avian
flu, acts of violence, shooting attack, or disturbance by criminal or
insane persons). The Northridge plan is reviewed and updated annually,
and the university regularly conducts training and exercises.
CSUN Public Safety Department officers, who have full police
powers, have been specially trained and armed to deal with active
shooting incidents. CSUN also has mutual aid agreements with other law
enforcement agencies such as the California Highway Patrol.
The CSUN Public Safety Department regularly teams with its
counterparts in university Student Affairs and Counseling to discuss
and assess potentially serious student behavior problems. If warranted,
university police conduct threat assessments designed to head off
problems.
The University has a functioning emergency broadcast system on the
main campus. The system uses speakers mounted on the roofs of major
buildings, allow voice broadcasting throughout the main campus.
In an initiative begun after Hurricane Katrina, the University is
currently testing another mass notification system called Connect-Ed
that can rapidly deliver recorded voice messages (and text messages) to
the phones and e-mail in boxes of all students, faculty and staff,
including TTY capability for those who are deaf and hard-of-hearing.
This year, the campus opened a new, state-of-the-art $10 million
Public Safety/Parking Department headquarters located in the heart of
the campus. The two-story 26,000-square-foot facility included an
expanded Emergency Operations Center. Public Safety also maintains a
40-foot command post trailer that can serve as a mobile EOC. Two other
sites are also under development. Redundancy for emergency response is
built into the development of units at different sites.
Should a disaster occur a Campus Closure Integrated Communication
Protocol is activated. This protocol supplements the CSUN Emergency
Operations Plan by providing detailed guidelines for communication with
members of the campus community when classes are cancelled and the
campus is closed due to an emergency or other unforeseen circumstance.
The Emergency Operations Plan provides specific guidelines on
notifications, mobilization of the Crisis Action Team, and possible
activation of the Emergency Operations Center (EOC).
Currently all 23 campuses of the CSU and the Office of the
Chancellor have developed all hazard (natural and man-made)
preparedness plans. Each plan has addenda for a specific hazard and
many have been in development since the mid 1990s. Initially the campus
plans were developed using the State's Standardized Emergency
Management System (SEMS) and then revised to comply with the federal
mandated National Incident Management System (NIMS).
Communications is the fundamental capability to prevent, react,
respond and recover from an event. There is no one size or one
technology that fits all situations. Each campus establishes its
individual communication plan to operate for a variety of incidents/
hazards using their available technologies for the specific event
(broadcast e-mail, websites, phones, bullhorns, sirens, etc.).
Training occurs for all levels of CSU employees including
Presidents, their designated back-ups and members of the emergency
Operations Team. Routine sessions emphasize overall plans and specific
facets of the campus plan. Crisis Communications is an area of focus in
the CSU leadership training.
Crisis Communications such as occurred in the Northridge
Earthquake, Katrina and shooting and terror acts require tough
decisions by humans with limited information available as a crisis
unfolds. Questions that must be asked are:
How or can this event escalate in severity?
What needs to be done immediately to prevent further
injury, death or damage to property?
The CSU strives to respond appropriately through its actions and
communications to its campus population, community, and for large scale
or catastrophic events, local regional, national and international
media and populations.
CSU has experienced the misfortune of active shooters over the
years and have developed specific campus plans for this type of event.
All the events whether in the CSU or in other locations, cause us to
re-evaluate and update the campus' overall plans.
In spring 2001, the CSU engaged former FEMA Director James Lee Witt
to conduct various hazard/vulnerability assessments, including an
active shooter scenario at SFSU. We maintain active ``mutual aid''
agreements with local and state public safety agencies to assist when
an event exceeds our capabilities.
Future CSU Emergency Planning
Continue to re-assess our active shooter and all hazard
plans
Re-emphasis placed on Prevention, Response, Communications
and Recovery from the lessons learned from the Virginia Tech University
(VTU) event
Continue to exercise our plans and test both our
capabilities and test for events beyond our abilities and work on
shortfalls observed in our practices
Continue to seek funding and grants to improve our
equipment and plan documents
Training sessions planned for our Presidents at the end of
June with James Lee Witt, including crisis communications and lessons
learned from VTU
Continue to work with State Office of Emergency Services
including participating in the GAP analysis initiative to identify and
quantify what is available and what will be needed in a catastrophic
event
The CSU remains vigilant in our efforts to preserve and protect
life and property, and prepare to the best of our ability for such an
event, to expect the unexpected, communicate our plans to the broadest
possible audience, involve our entire campus community in improving our
plans and continually seek to improve through routine testing and
exercising of our plans for an event we hope will never happen.
Unpredictability is inherent in disasters and makes planning for
such an event a challenge.
______
Chairman Miller. Dr. Cornell.
STATEMENT OF DEWEY CORNELL, DIRECTOR, VIRGINIA YOUTH VIOLENCE
PROJECT, SCHOOL OF EDUCATION, UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA
Mr. Cornell. Chairman Miller, Ranking Member McKeon,
members of the committee, thank you for inviting me here today,
and thank you, Representative Scott, for your kind introduction
and for all of the work that you have done over the years.
In 1999, I assisted the FBI in its study of school
shootings which recommended that schools use a threat
assessment approach to prevent school violence. Threat
assessment is a standard law enforcement approach developed by
the Secret Service and used in many different settings. Threat
assessment involves identifying a threat, evaluating how
serious it is and taking action to prevent it from being
carried out. My colleagues and I developed and field-tested a
threat assessment procedure for primary and secondary schools
that can be extended to colleges. I am going to talk first
about school safety and then about threat assessment. Pardon me
for speaking quickly. I have got a lot to cover, and you know
how professors love to pontificate.
In response to every school shooting, there are calls to
increase security and even to arm teachers. Such
recommendations focus on crisis response, but prevention can
not wait until the gunman is in your parking lot. I am here
today to emphasis prevention. We have to study the problem
objectively and make sure that our responses are not skewed by
extreme cases. After Columbine, many schools overreacted by
expanding zero tolerance policies so that students were
expelled for actions as trivial as having a plastic knife in
their lunch box. Despite the recent shootings, scientific
studies cited in my written statement demonstrate that schools
are safe and that violence is decreasing, not increasing, both
in our schools and on our college campuses. With the exception
of this year, there are about 16 murders on college campuses
each year. With 4,200 colleges, the average college can expect
a murder on campus about once every 265 years. If you include
murders in the surrounding community, off campus as well as on
campus, the rate is about once every 9 years. Now, of course,
we want the number to be zero. We want to prevent every single
possible fatality, but we have to look objectively and
recognize the challenge that is in front of us to deal with
that lofty standard. In addition to homicides, we have less
severe but more pervasive forms of violence such as bullying
and fighting, and fortunately, a scientific review of more than
200 controlled studies has found that school violence
prevention programs can reduce violent and disruptive behavior
by about 50 percent. Funding for school violence prevention to
the Office of Safe and Drug Free Schools should be protected
and expanded. Terms like ``school violence'' and ``campus
violence,'' I think, are misleading, because they imply that
the location is the defining feature of the problem. We have
had mass shootings in restaurants, but no one talks about
restaurant violence. The focus on location leads to unrealistic
efforts to make our open public places so secure that they are
no longer open or public, so we cannot turn our schools into
fortresses.
The Virginia Tech shooting appears to be the act of an
individual who was paranoid, delusional and suicidal. This
shooting represent a mental health problem more than a school
problem. Our Nation suffers from poor insurance coverage for
mental health services and from poor communication and
coordination among those services. Even when we know someone
needs treatment, there is no effective mechanism to make sure
the treatment is delivered and no follow-up to make sure it was
effective. College campuses see many students with serious
mental health problems. Yet, their staffing levels and
resources are limited and are focused on short-term treatment.
Now, both the FBI and the Secret Service recommended a
threat-assessment approach because, in almost every school
shooting, the violent student communicated his intentions well
in advance. At the University of Virginia, we trained threat
assessment teams in 35 schools for field test, and each team
included a school administrator, a psychologist and a law
enforcement officer. Although serious acts of violence are
rare, threats are very common, and in 1 year, these teams
investigated 188 student threats of violence. All of the
threats were not the same. About 75 percent were just
statements made in anger or jest that could be readily resolved
with an explanation, counseling and an apology. The remaining
30 percent were more serious, and usually they involved one
student threatening to fight another student, but we also had
threats to shoot and kill that were resolved. In these cases,
our teams conducted a safety evaluation that included both the
psychological assessment and a law enforcement investigation.
Every threat signals a problem that should be addressed before
it escalates into violence, and in our follow-up study, we
found that none of the threats were carried out. Just six
students were arrested, and three were expelled, which is much
better than if the schools had used a zero tolerance approach.
A study by the American Psychological Association found
that zero tolerance has a damaging effect on student
achievement and no evidence that it makes schools safer.
So, over the past 5 years, we have trained thousands of
school teams in a dozen States. Memphis City schools adapted
our motto, and were able to resolve more than 200 threats
without any known violent outcomes and, again, keeping almost
all of the students in school, but there has been no Federal
program designated to fund threat assessment research or
training, and so, when this committee works on No Child Left
Behind, I hope you will make threat assessment part of every
college's comprehensive school safety plan.
Let me wrap up by saying that threat assessment can be
extended to colleges, even though it is easier to monitor and
to supervise a high school student than a college student.
Threat assessment is used in business and in industry to
prevent workplace violence, so this challenge can be overcome.
In closing, our schools and colleges are safe, but in a
large nation with thousands of schools, even rare events will
occur with troubling frequency and skew our perceptions of
safety. We must avoid overacting to rare events and make better
use of prevention methods, including threat assessment.
Thank you for the opportunity to present this testimony. I
am pleased to answer any questions.
[The statement of Mr. Cornell follows:]
Prepared Statement of Dewey G. Cornell, Ph.D., Forensic Clinical
Psychologist and Professor of Education, Director of the Virginia Youth
Violence Project, Curry School of Education, University of Virginia
Student Threat Assessment
Good morning Chairman Miller, Ranking Member McKeon and
distinguished members of the Committee. Thank you for inviting me here
today. I applaud you for your efforts to make college campuses safer by
convening this hearing.
I am Dr. Dewey Cornell, a forensic clinical psychologist, a member
of the American Psychological Association, and Professor in the School
of Education at the University of Virginia. I direct the Virginia Youth
Violence Project, which studies school safety and violence prevention
(http://youthviolence.edschool.virginia.edu). For 23 years I have
conducted research on the psychological characteristics of young people
who commit violent acts, and as a clinician, I have examined many
juvenile and young adult offenders.
In 1999 I assisted the FBI in its study of school shootings
(O'Toole, 2000). Both the FBI study and another study conducted by the
Secret Service (Fein et al., 2002) strongly recommended that schools
train their staff to use a threat assessment approach to prevent
student violence. Threat assessment is a procedure developed by the
Secret Service that has become a standard law enforcement approach used
in many different settings (Fein, Vossekuil, & Holden, 1995). Threat
assessment involves identifying a threat, evaluating how serious it is,
and taking action to prevent it from being carried out. Most educators
were completely unfamiliar with ``threat assessment'' and were
unprepared to implement this approach. In response, my colleagues and I
at the University of Virginia have developed and field-tested a threat
assessment model for primary and secondary schools. I am going to talk
first about the safety of our schools and then about our research on
threat assessment and how it can be used to improve the safety
conditions in our nation's colleges as well as our K-12 schools.
This year we have experienced tragic shootings at the Amish school
in Pennsylvania and at Virginia Tech, among others. In response to such
horrific events, there have been calls to increase security at our
schools, and even suggestions to arm our teachers. There are
recommendations to install sirens and cameras and to create high-tech
warning systems to alert students to an attack. While these
interventions focus on crisis response, it is critically important that
our efforts concentrate on prevention strategies. Prevention cannot
wait until the gunman is in your parking lot. School shootings can be
prevented and I am here today to emphasize prevention.
In order to prevent violence, we have to study the problem
objectively and make sure that our responses are not skewed by extreme
cases. After Columbine, many schools overreacted by expanding zero
tolerance programs so that students were expelled for behaviors as
trivial as bringing a plastic knife to school in their lunch box. We
continue to see students as young as five years old being arrested for
misbehavior that would have been handled much differently ten years
ago. We have to be careful that our responses are measured and
reasonable.
Schools are safe
First, I want to address school safety from a broader and more
positive perspective. Despite recent events, the level of violent crime
in our schools and colleges is low. National crime statistics
demonstrate that it is safer for a student to be at school than to be
at home or on the street. Crime victim research also finds that
students are less likely to be harmed at school than in the community
(DeVoe, Peter,Noonan, Snyder, & Baum, 2005). These findings hold up for
both K-12 schools and colleges. For example, the violent crime rate is
lower on college campuses than off campuses and the victimization rate
for college students is lower than for persons the same age who are not
in college (Baum & Klaus, 2005).
Furthermore, there is no upward trend of increasing violence in our
schools. Over the past ten years, the rate of violence in schools and
colleges has actually declined substantially (Baum & Klein, 2005;
DeVoe, Peter,Noonan, Snyder, & Baum, 2005). The scientific studies to
support these conclusions are cited in my written statement.
According to the latest available data from the U.S. Department of
Education (2001-2004), there were 95 murders on college campuses in the
six years from 1999 to 2004, an average of 16 per year. Since there are
approximately 4,200 colleges in the United States, this means the
average college can expect to experience a murder on campus about once
every 265 years. If you include all 2,808 murders that occurred in the
surrounding community--off campus as well as on campus--the rate is
much higher: about once every 9 years. This is a reflection of the much
higher rate of violence in the general community.
It was tragic to have 33 deaths in one day at Virginia Tech, but
according to the CDC, every year more than 30,000 persons die by
firearms through suicide or homicide. This is the equivalent of the
Virginia Tech death toll occurring 2 to 3 times every day. This is not
to minimize the tragedy of school shootings; we want the number to be
zero. But if we are going to prevent these events, we have to start
with placing them in a broader context.
Schools need prevention programs
Although research demonstrates that schools are safe and that
extreme acts of violence are unlikely, we do have less severe forms of
violence such as bullying, fighting, and threatening behavior. These
are important problems in their own right, and they are also important
because they can escalate into shootings.
Fortunately, we have effective violence prevention programs for
schools. There have been more than 200 controlled studies of school
violence prevention programs, and we know that school-based mental
health programs and counseling focused on helping students learn how to
solve problems and resolve conflicts are effective (Wilson, Lipsey, &
Derzon, 2003). A scientific review of these studies by researchers at
Vanderbilt University found that they can reduce violent and disruptive
behavior by about 50 percent (Wilson, Lipsey, & Derzon, 2003). If these
programs were more widely used, we could identify and help troubled
students before they reach the point of homicide. The main source of
funding for school violence prevention is through the Office of Safe
and Drug-Free Schools. Funding for this program should be protected and
expanded.
Terms like ``school violence'' and ``campus violence'' are
misleading because they imply that the location is the defining feature
of the problem. We have had mass shootings in restaurants and shopping
malls, but no one speaks about ``restaurant violence'' or ``mall
violence.'' The focus on location leads to unrealistic efforts to make
open, public places so secure that they are no longer open or public.
We cannot turn our schools into fortresses. We cannot search every
backpack on college campuses.
The Virginia Tech shooting appears to be the act of an individual
with severe mental illness who was paranoid, delusional, and suicidal.
This shooting represents a mental health problem more than a school
problem. Our nation suffers from poor insurance coverage for mental
health services, and from poor communication and coordination among
these services. Even when we know someone needs treatment, there is no
effective mechanism to make sure the treatment is delivered and no
follow-up to make sure it was effective. College campuses see a
substantial number of students with serious mental health problems, yet
their staffing levels and resources are focused on short term
counseling.
Schools need a threat assessment approach
After Columbine, there was widespread demand for a checklist of
characteristics that we could use to identify the next shooter. This is
called profiling, and both the FBI and Secret Service have concluded
that profiling is not possible for this kind of crime (O'Toole, 2000;
Vossekuil, Fein, Reddy, Borum, & Modzeleski, 2002). The backgrounds of
school shooters are too varied, and the characteristics they have in
common are too general.
However, both the FBI and Secret Service observed that in almost
every case the violent student communicated his or her intentions well
in advance of an attack. These individuals usually made threats or
engaged in threatening behavior that frightened others. The problem was
that there was not an effective, systematic response to these threats.
The FBI also observed that many potential school shootings were
prevented because threats were investigated and found to be credible.
In light of these findings, both the FBI and the Secret Service, in
conjunction with the U.S. Department of Education, recommended that
schools adopt a threat assessment approach (O'Toole, 2000; Fein et al.,
2002).
Threat assessment is a standardized procedure for investigating a
threat, and if the threat is a serious substantive threat, taking
preventive action. At the University of Virginia we developed a set of
threat assessment guidelines and we trained teams in 35 schools
(Cornell, et al., 2004). Each team included a school administrator, a
psychologist or counselor, and a law enforcement officer. The teams
field-tested the guidelines for a year. Although serious acts of
violence are rare in schools, threats are common. The school teams
investigated 188 student threats of violence.
All threats are not the same. Some threats are just statements made
in anger or in jest, or attempts to gain attention or be provocative.
The first step in threat assessment is to determine whether the threat
is serious, which we term substantive, or not serious or transient.
Fortunately, most threats are transient and can be readily resolved
with an explanation, an apology, and some counseling. About 70 percent
of the threats were resolved in this manner.
The remaining 30 percent of threats were more serious, usually one
student threatening to fight another student, but we had threats to
shoot and stab and kill that could not be easily resolved. In these
cases, our threat assessment team conducted a safety evaluation that
included two components: a psychological assessment of the student and
a law enforcement investigation of whether there was evidence that the
person was preparing to carry out the threat. The combination of mental
health and law enforcement is essential to a threat assessment.
The team takes a problem solving approach--why did this student
make a threat and what can we do to reduce the risk of violence? We
found students who had serious mental health problems that needed
treatment. We found students who were victims of bullying and looking
for a way to strike back. We found conflicts over girlfriends and
boyfriends. All kinds of threats.
Every threat signals an underlying problem that should be addressed
before it escalates into violence. In our follow-up study, we could not
find that any of the threats were carried out. Out of 188 cases, we had
just six students who were arrested and three who were expelled. This
is a much better result than if the schools had used a zero tolerance
approach that would have resulted in numerous expulsions. The American
Psychological Association's report on zero tolerance (Skiba et al.,
2006) found that school expulsions have a damaging effect on student
achievement and increase the dropout rate. There is no evidence that
zero tolerance makes schools safer.
Memphis City Public Schools has adapted our model and found that
they were able to resolve more than 200 threats without any known
violent outcomes and again keeping almost all of the students in school
(Strong, Wilkins, & Cornell, 2007). Over the past 5 years we have
trained thousands of threat assessment teams in a dozen states. But we
need more research on threat assessment. There has been no federal
program designated to fund threat assessment research. The Secret
Service has conducted threat assessment training in conjunction with
the Office of Safe and Drug-Free Schools, but this has been a limited
effort. We need a strong initiative to make threat assessment part of
every school's comprehensive school safety plan. I hope this Committee
will keep this need in mind when it works to strengthen crucial federal
programs such as those authorized under No Child Left Behind.
Threat assessment can be adapted for colleges, too, even though
there are some important differences between K-12 schools and colleges.
College students are adults and not under parental control. It is much
easier to monitor and supervise a high school student than a college
student. On the other hand, threat assessment is used in business and
industry to prevent workplace violence (Gelles & Turner, 2003), so
these challenges can be overcome.
Conclusions
In closing, our educational institutions have an obligation to
maintain a safe and supportive environment that is conducive to
learning. Overall, our schools and colleges are safe, but in a large
nation with thousands of schools, even rare events will occur with
troubling frequency and skew our perceptions of safety and risk. We
must avoid overreacting to rare events and make better use of
prevention methods that address the ordinary forms of violence as well
as the more extreme ones.
Threat assessment is a standard violence prevention approach used
by law enforcement in many different settings. Our research supports
the use of threat assessment in schools, but we need more research and
training to make it a standard practice and to extend it to colleges.
We urge you to support research and training on threat assessment for
our schools and colleges.
Thank you, again, for the opportunity to present this testimony. I
would be pleased to answer any questions.
REFERENCES
Cornell, D., Sheras, P. Kaplan, S., McConville, D., Douglass, J.,
Elkon, A., McKnight, L., Branson, C., & Cole, J. (2004).
Guidelines for student threat assessment: Field-test findings.
School Psychology Review, 33, 527-546.
DeVoe, J. F., Peter, K., Noonan, M., Snyder, T. D., & Baum, K. (2005).
Indicators of school crime and safety: 2005 (NCES 2006-001/NCJ
210697). U.S. Departments of Education and Justice. Washington,
DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.
Fein, R.A., Vossekuil, F., & Holden, G.A. (1995). Threat assessment: An
approach to prevent targeted violence. National Institute of
Justice: Research in Action, 1-7 (NCJ 155000), Available http:/
/www.secretservice.gov/ntac.htm.
Fein, R., Vossekuil, B., Pollack, W., Borum, R., Modzeleski, W. &
Reddy, M. (2002). Threat assessment in schools: A guide to
managing threatening situations and to creating safe school
climates. Washington, DC: U.S. Secret Service and Department of
Education.
Gelles, M.G. & Turner, J. T. (2003). Threat assessment: A risk
management approach. Bethesda, MD: Haworth Press, Inc.
O'Toole, M.E. (2000). The school shooter: A threat assessment
perspective. Quantico, Virginia: National Center for the
Analysis of Violent Crime, Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Skiba, R., Reynolds, C., Graham, S., Sheras, P., Conoley, J., & Garcia-
Vazquez, E. (2006). Are zero tolerance policies effective in
the schools? An evidentiary review and recommendations. A
report by the American Psychological Association Zero Tolerance
Task Force. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
Strong, K., Wilkins, D., & Cornell, D. (2007). Student threat
assessment in Memphis City Schools. Unpublished report.
Memphis, Tennessee: Memphis City Schools.
U.S. Department of Education (2001- 2004). Summary of Campus Crime and
Security Statistics. Washington, D.C. (http://www.ed.gov/
admins/lead/safety/crime/criminaloffenses/index.html)
Vossekuil, B., Fein, R. A., Reddy, M., Borum, R., & Modzeleski, W.
(2002). The final report and findings of the Safe School
Initiative: Implications for the prevention of school attacks
in the United States. Washington, DC: U.S. Secret Service and
U.S. Department of Education.
Wilson, S.J., Lipsey, M.W., & Derzon, J.H. (2003). The effects of
school-based intervention programs on aggressive behavior: A
meta-analysis. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology,
71, 136-149.
BIOGRAPHICAL STATEMENT
Dewey G. Cornell, Ph. D. is a forensic clinical psychologist and
Professor of Education in the Curry School of Education at the
University of Virginia. Dr. Cornell is Director of the UVA Youth
Violence Project and a faculty associate of the Institute of Law,
Psychiatry, and Public Policy. As a clinician, Dr. Cornell has 24 years
experience evaluating juvenile and adult violent offenders and
testifying in legal proceedings, including school shootings and other
juvenile homicide cases. He consulted with the FBI in its study of
school shootings and developed threat assessment guidelines for schools
that are being used throughout Virginia and other states. As a
researcher, Dr. Cornell has authored more than 100 publications in
psychology and education, including studies of juvenile homicide,
bullying, psychopathy, and violence. He is currently directing a
statewide study of school climate and discipline practices in 312
Virginia high schools.
______
Chairman Miller. Thank you.
Dr. Walbert.
STATEMENT OF JAN WALBERT, PRESIDENT, NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF
STUDENT PERSONNEL ADMINISTRATORS, AND VICE PRESIDENT FOR
STUDENT AFFAIRS, ARCADIA UNIVERSITY
Ms. Walbert. Good morning.
Chairman Miller, thank you for that generous introduction.
Mr. McKeon and other members of the committee, I am pleased to
be here to testify today.
In addition to representing Arcadia University and NASPA, I
am here today due to extensive collaboration among student
affairs associations included on the consortium on government
relations for student affairs, which, in addition to NASPA, is
composed of the American College Personnel Association, the
Association of College Unions International, the Association of
Student Judicial Affairs, and the Association of College and
University Housing Officers International. There are three
primary points I will address.
One, the role of student affairs professionals is central
to the implementation of effective education, prevention and
intervention systems that do exist on campuses. Given that 17
million students attend colleges and universities, it is worth
noting that U.S. News and World Report indicate campuses remain
among the safest places in America.
Two, there is considerable evidence that we are facing
increases in the mental health issues among students. Research
suggests that strategies are effective in dealing with college
students, and existing laws protect and support students'
privacy as well as serve to protect the community, and most
importantly, for today, we can always learn more and work to
improve our current systems. I speak now only from my own
experiences as a senior student affairs officer, but I also
speak on behalf of more than 25,000 student affairs
administrators throughout the U.S.
As dedicated educators, vice presidents, deans in those
many areas that were mentioned in the introduction, we work
with the students 24/7. We enhance students' well-being and
ensure that our campus environments are conducive to student
learning. Our roles include collaboration on prevention and
intervention strategies as well as planning for and responding
to those critical situations and campus emergencies. Contrary
to the typical perspective that academic endeavors occur only
in the classroom, we in student affairs educate at every level
and around the clock. For example, I am sure that each of you
can think of life skills you learned somewhere other than a
classroom as an undergraduate student.
There are no guarantees as we are sadly reminded at this
time in our history. The horrific events that occurred at
Virginia Tech could have happened anywhere across this Nation.
They could have happened on another campus despite the fact
that there are extensive systems to deal with crises such as
the death of a student by natural causes or suicide as well as
natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina. However, primary
efforts of prevention and intervention are utilized with much
greater frequency. There is no way to count how many crises
have been averted. It may not be surprising that we face
critical situations so frequently that many of us are quite
familiar with communication chains, law enforcement colleagues
and mental health resources. When I walk into our local
hospital or one time when I was wheeled in as a patient, the
staff recognized me and often called me by name. Prevention,
intervention and response to critical situations succeed with
extensive collaboration. When a serious concern about a student
recently surfaced on our campus--and there have been several
recently--contacts were made with public safety, faculty and
residents' life staff. Ultimately, we engaged the family. With
everyone's assistance, the student was admitted to an inpatient
facility. Whether the student's life will change enough to help
that student survive over time, I may never know, but we do
know that cooperation with counseling staff and others allowed
us to get that student to a safer place at that time.
Like this example, most incidences occur on campuses
without fanfare, with no media exposure, and they result in
safe outcomes for students. Due to the success, we can
anticipate that the demands for services will continue to
escalate as will the need for additional resources. Students
exhibiting disruptive or dangerous behavior may face interim
suspensions and administrative or disciplinary action, which
may include or require consultation with qualified mental
health professionals and parents.
We are constantly learning common and best practices occur
at institutions of all sizes and types. Approaches to enhanced
counseling services, case management strategies and emergency
response protocols are shared regularly. Even with extensive
collaboration, sound practices, policies and laws, we cannot
eliminate all risks of crises or emergencies. We must plan and
intentionally think through these issues.
When a parent called me on the morning of September 11th,
he asked, ``How are you going to protect my daughter?'' I
responded quite genuinely.
I said, ``Sir, we have not been able to protect the
Pentagon today. You can see how it would be irresponsible of
higher education to make promises of our ability to absolutely
protect the safety of each and every student. We may wish we
were sanctuaries, and the public may still consider us as such,
but the concept of an ivory tower is long gone.''
Thank you for this opportunity to represent my colleagues
in the important work that they do. I look forward to your
questions.
Chairman Miller. Thank you very much.
[The statement of Ms. Walbert follows:]
Prepared Statement of Janet E. Walbert, Ed.D., President, National
Association of Student Personnel Administrators, Vice President for
Student Affairs, Arcadia University
Good morning Chairman Miller, Ranking Member McKeon, and Members of
the Committee on Education and Labor.
My name is Janet Walbert and I serve as Vice President for Student
Affairs at Arcadia University, a coeducational private, comprehensive
university located in Glenside, Pennsylvania, in the suburbs of
Philadelphia. I also testify to you today in the capacity of President
of the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators
(NASPA). NASPA is the largest professional association for student
affairs administrators, faculty, and graduate students in the student
affairs field, representing more than 1,400 campuses in 29 countries
around the world.
Thank you for giving me this opportunity to testify today. I am
here to speak not only from my own experiences as a senior student
affairs officer, but I also speak on behalf of the more than 25,000
student affairs administrators employed at colleges and universities
throughout the nation. We collaborate with many colleagues and other
associations. Student affairs administrators on campuses across the
country are working to address and enhance students' well-being and to
ensure that our campus environments are conducive to student learning.
In addition, national student affairs associations are working together
to provide additional best practices and policy considerations. The
Consortium on Government Relations for Student Affairs is composed of:
American College Personnel Association (ACPA); Association of College
Unions International (ACUI); Association of Student Judicial Affairs
(ASJA); National Association of Student Personnel Administrators
(NASPA); and Association of College and University Housing Officers
International (ACUHO-I). These organizations collaborate on the
development of strategies and public policy issues of concern to
student affairs professionals. It is through the efforts of such
collaboration that I testify today.
There are five primary points I hope to address through this
testimony.
Student Affairs professionals are meaningfully engaged in
the lives and well-being of college and university students.
Effective systems exist on most campuses and address a
large majority of situations, with many situations never reaching a
critical point because of effective prevention and early intervention,
but there are no guarantees.
We face increases in the mental health issues among
students and these challenges are successfully addressed in most cases.
Current laws exist to protect and support students'
privacy as well as protect the community and allow for communication
with appropriate family members when an individual's personal well-
being is at risk.
We can always learn more and we must continue to work on
improving systems.
Student affairs administrators, like me, play key roles in
educating our nation's students as we work directly with students and
the varied support networks of family members and other university
colleagues. In addition, our roles include planning for campus
emergencies and managing campus crises, which occur at many levels and
in a range of magnitudes of visibility and complexities. As
professionals we dedicate our daily (and nightly) work with our
students, and team with many others to enhance the quality of the
learning environments in our campus communities. While there are no
guarantees, as we are sadly reminded at this time in our history, we
work collaboratively to address prevention, intervention and response
to critical situations involving our students.
Student affairs administrators are vice presidents of student
affairs, deans of students, mental health professionals, housing
officers, student activities administrators, fiscal officers, food
service administrators, admissions officers, Greek life advisors,
recreation managers, and so much more. It is the job of student affairs
professionals to facilitate student learning through action,
contemplation, reflection, and emotional engagement, as well as
information acquisition. In the college and university environment
student affairs departments often work collaboratively with colleagues
in of academic affairs to promote the development of the whole student.
In order to prepare for professional positions within the field of
student affairs, administrators build upon personal experiences and
often enroll in graduate school programs, grounded in student
development theory as well as counseling and leadership components.
Through ongoing professional development provided by postsecondary
institutions, professional associations and collegial networks, student
affairs administrators are able to ensure that current best practices
are implemented on their respective campuses. As educators we are
prepare students for effective and engaged citizenship.
Every day, and most nights and weekends, my colleagues across the
nation focus their collective energies and attention on how our living
and learning environments are meeting the needs of individual students
and the expectations of parents. Contrary to the typical perspective
that academic endeavors occur only in classrooms, we in student affairs
educate at every level, around the clock.
The horrific events that occurred at Virginia Tech on April 16th
could have happened anywhere across the nation. They could have
happened on another campus despite the fact that higher education
administrators generally, and student affairs administrators
specifically, have established extensive systems to deal with
individual student crises as well as larger catastrophes on campus--
whether it is the death of a student by natural causes or suicide,
natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina, or acts of terrorism that
could potentially harm students, faculty, and staff. Our focus has been
and will continue to be on diligence in both efforts of prevention as
well as effective response.
The reality is that extremely good systems are fully operational on
most of our campuses. Student affairs officers currently share best
practices and strategies, meet with experts, and participate in
electronic and in-person educational programs throughout the year.
Participation in the National Incident Management System (NIMS) is an
example of on-line training and efforts to integrate common knowledge
and systems into campus-based protocols and policies.
Virtually every college and university campus today has a crisis
management plan, clear protocols for managing emergencies, and
strategies to communicate with the campus constituencies directly and
indirectly affected. These plans were implemented six years ago when
our campuses moved swiftly and expeditiously to respond to the events
of September 11, 2001--to secure our campuses and to respond to the
needs of our students. When Texas A&M University responded immediately
to a campus bonfire accident that killed 12 students and injured 27
others, the emergency protocols were successfully enacted. Similarly
protocols were in place that helped restore order to the University of
Florida following the killing of three college students by a serial
murderer. They are implemented any time a student dies on our campuses.
It may be considered unfortunate, but not unexpected, that so many
campuses deal with crises of one nature or another frequently enough to
be familiar with the various aspects of our communication chains, local
law enforcement agencies, mental health resources, and community health
organizations.
The challenge has always been and remains today that college and
university campuses, by their very, nature are open and accessible
places. In testimony provided by Dr. Thomas Kepple, President of
Juniata College, in the Pennsylvania Senate Education Committee
Hearings on May 2, 2007, he stated: ``The founders of America's early
colleges were often graduates of universities like Oxford and
Cambridge. Unlike those exclusive universities, Americans wanted our
colleges to be inclusive. * * * Our colleges and universities are very
much physical symbols of a new and very inclusive democracy.'' Many of
the nation's 439 public four-year institutions cover acres of land and
enroll in the tens of thousands of students. Some 17 million students
attend this country's more than 4,000 colleges and universities. Most
campuses do not have single points of entry or any means for
controlling access to every square inch of campus. We may wish we were
sanctuaries--and the public may still consider us as such--but the
concept of academe's ivory tower is long gone.
Reports of disruptive behavior in classrooms, residence halls, and
even in surrounding communities are commonly referred to student
affairs administrators. To best address both isolated and repeated
problems, a coordinated effort from administrators across campus is
required. In attempts to identify students at risk, we must constantly
work to improve our ability to share information and cover all bases.
This includes information from peers, from mental health centers, from
faculty, from other students in residence halls, from concerned
parents, and from campus police. When a student appears on the radar
screen at any corner of campus, we must and do exercise prudent
judgment and share information with appropriate constituents on campus.
Intervention must be rapid but correct, and points of intervention
across campus must be clearly defined and communicated.
Situations where faculty raise questions, students report
situations, and other staff members know of special circumstances, such
as a death in the family, arise every day on our campuses. We deal with
these situations formally, informally, and directly with students.
Depending on the magnitude of the situation and the information
available from the student, communication with parents or family
members may occur. From the time students set foot on our campuses, we
build partnerships with parents to enhance communications. Frequently,
students engage their parents as a result of the direct involvement of
student affairs. The existing laws allow for communication with
appropriate family members when an individual's personal well-being is
at risk. Balancing the standard thresholds and expectations of when to
communicate continues to be at the forefront of the thinking of student
affairs administrators, as it has been historically for counselors in
confidential relationships with clients.
As part of a college or university's executive leadership team,
vice presidents for student affairs and deans of students work hand-in-
hand with their senior administrative counterparts and other student
affairs and academic affairs staff members to plan, execute, and
evaluate campus prevention efforts, crisis protocols, and intervention
strategies. Collaboration on campus is essential and common. None of us
can do this alone. We also work in coordination with the campus safety
departments and local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies to
enhance safety inside and outside the campus.
At all institutions, students are repeatedly informed of safety
protocols. Written and verbal communications ensure that students are
informed of campus safety policies and procedures. Programs such as
orientation sessions and residence hall meetings facilitate students'
understanding of these policies in an effort to augment their own and
their peers' safety on and off campus. Students must take some
responsibility to understand the importance of this information. All of
these mechanisms are also enhanced with the development of electronic
communication allowing access to this information at the touch of a
fingertip 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Campus security is enhanced with the utilization of electronic
surveillance and electronic access to residence halls. Student affairs
professionals train resident assistants to identify potential threats
to the safety and security of students living in residence halls. While
resident assistants cannot take the place of campus safety and law
enforcement officials or campus judicial officers, they are well
trained and effective liaisons in recognizing and addressing
interpersonal conflicts, code of student conduct violations, signs of
mental health concerns, and other critical issues relating to the well-
being of residents.
Our campuses are inseparable from the very communities and diverse
cultures that form this great country. Like thousands of communities
across the nation, we have our share of residents who abuse drugs or
alcohol, who have been involved in confrontations with faculty members
or fellow students, or who have traded threatening e-mails. These
situations are not unusual, nor are they taken lightly.
Just like the general population, our student populations include
increasing numbers of individuals dealing with mental health issues. In
recent years, students increasingly report stress, depression, thoughts
of suicide, relationship problems, and substance abuse problems. In the
2006 National Survey of Counseling Center Directors that includes data
provided by directors from 367 counseling centers at institutions
across the United States 92 percent of the respondents believed that
the number of students with severe psychological problems has increased
in recent years. According to the survey, directors reported that 40
percent of their clients have severe psychological problems. In a
survey conducted by the American College Health Association-National
College Health Assessment (2006) of more than 94,000 students and 123
postsecondary institutions, more than half of the students reported
feeling hopeless in the past year, more than 35 percent reported
feeling so depressed that they could not function three or more times a
year, and nearly 10 percent reported seriously considering suicide in
the previous year. Additional research reported in 2006 conducted by
Allan Schwartz, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the
University of Rochester, indicates when the data related to suicide is
analyzed comparing college students and the general population,
controlled for age and gender, it appears that counseling centers are
effective in treating suicidal students. The bottom line: healthcare
professionals have become so good at treating young people with
psychological issues that growing numbers are able to attend college
and obtain degrees. Thanks to greater student access to psychotherapy,
advances in medications to treat psychological problems, and growing
public acceptance of antidepressant therapies, we have more students on
our campuses that face these mental health problems. In addition, we
have many students who, with support and responsiveness of strong
campus professionals, manage or overcome their personal hurdles and
successfully complete their educational pursuits.
Student affairs administrators are among those who are lowering
thresholds of tolerance for aberrant behavior, whether it is the
possession of weapons, verbal threats, or stalking. We are swiftly
taking action before student behavior becomes harmful to others, and we
are making it easier and more comfortable for students to raise
concerns to campus staff members in a confidential manner. Hotlines,
web access to file reports of concern, information about referral
mechanisms, and communication about how to assist others are common on
many campuses. The ability to document how many incidents are averted
or limited in scope because of expedient responses by student and
professional staff is limited. It is extremely difficult if not
impossible to document concrete results of prevention efforts. Yet, we
know that we are educating about civility, communication, conflict
resolution, and understanding diversity across the nation's campuses.
Higher education is not above the law. We must protect individual
rights and follow the law in dealing with an individual's right to
participate fully in campus life. If a student misses a series of
classes because they are depressed or they openly discuss suicide or
other unacceptable behaviors, we cannot simply banish them from our
campuses. It is these very types of situations that, when addressed,
are typically resolved before a tragedy occurs.
Our campuses must abide by federal and state confidentiality laws
regarding key records and communications and the release of
confidential information. Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973
protects qualified disabled individuals from being excluded from
participation in, being denied the benefits of, or being subjected to
discrimination under any program or activity receiving federal
financial assistance. While administrators cannot make the decision if
a student's mental health condition qualifies him or her as disabled,
mental health professionals on and off campus can provide that
assessment. If a student discusses disturbing thoughts during a campus
counseling session, the counselor must take precautions to avoid
violating the recognized psychotherapist-patient privilege.
To be aligned with our common mission, higher education
administrators, including senior student affairs officers, must have
the latitude to determine policies from the best educational approach.
While we certainly understand the importance of safe environments as a
key element for learning, our primary roles focus on the education of
all of our students. Engaging the community, opening our doors for
participation in campus events such as theater productions, concerts,
or use of our libraries, certainly allows a level of exposure, but one
most of us maintain is important. When focusing on our students, if
students are disruptive--defined as behavior that is typically well-
addressed in each institution's student code of conduct--we must hold
them accountable through progressive discipline. Dangerous or
disruptive behavior (including acts and threats of self-harm) can be,
and are frequently, addressed immediately by interim suspension
policies, followed by appropriate process for any administrative or
disciplinary proceedings. Common practices and administrative processes
give students opportunities to tell their stories. Colleges and
universities often include or require consultation with qualified
mental health professionals to establish that such students do not pose
a potential or immediate threat to oneself or the community.
Across the nation, many varied institutions are engaged in common
best practices that complement current efforts to minimize crises,
address situations that do arise and support the students, faculty, and
staff who may be affected. Examples of such best practices include the
following:
Creating expanded counseling services or a counselor-in-
residence position. On some campuses with expanded resources counselors
may be on call around the clock, have offices in the residence halls,
conduct programs, consult with staff, and intervene in crises.
Coordinating the delivery of resources to students with
behavioral or mental health problems via a student assistance
coordination committee. Committees exist that develop and implement
communication networks and protocols among relevant units to deliver
seamless services. Through consultations and referrals, members of the
campus community are encouraged to identify and address potential
behavioral or mental health problems and to review, update and
distribute critical incident response guidelines.
Holding monthly meetings of a crisis intervention
committee to review new and pending disciplinary cases that go beyond
ordinary or routine behaviors. Committee membership vary depending on
the campus but typically include the chief of police or campus safety,
housing representatives, university attorneys, human resources
representatives, on-call staff, dean or coordinator, judicial affairs
representatives, academic affairs representatives, counseling center
staff, and other administrators such as women's center directors or
student health services staff.
Assembling a case management group that meets biweekly to
share reports, even anonymous reports, about students of concern and
discuss possible interventions.
Charging the campus police chief or another appropriate
campus administrator to assemble, train and exercise an emergency
response team. Campuses simulate disaster days annually to fine-tune
the team's emergency response plan. In addition, weekly meetings,
including key student affairs officers and campus police, are held to
review police reports and flag unusual student activities from the
previous week.
Creating a permanent incident command centers with full
back-up generators and computers. This includes implementing an
emergency communications system for activating the command center and a
crisis action team.
The list goes on and on. The above identified activities summarize
just a few of the ongoing efforts at a wide range of institution types
and sizes, including: large and small; public and private, four-year
and two-year; community colleges and research institutions.
It is clear that we must continue to work on improving these
systems. While the senior student affairs officer often leads crisis
planning and response on campus, other student affairs administrators
participate daily in various aspects of response and communication
utilizing institutional protocols. Situations are documented and occur
with great frequency. These situations occur on campuses across the
country without fanfare and with no media exposure, and result safe
outcomes for the students, friends, and family. Actions include
interventions that maintain reasonable privacy and allow for students
to successfully resume typical college activities once the presenting
issues are addressed, often without the stigma that more public
responses may cause.
As student affairs officers look at old technologies such as
bullhorns and public address systems as well as the latest technologies
of e-mails and text messages, we must devise systems of swift and clear
communication to give students the information they need to make
informed decisions. Still, the decision to communicate and what to
communicate must be made by well-informed, well-prepared authorities on
each campus or in each community. We must be sure behaviors outside the
norm are duly noted and responded to in a timely manner. We must work
diligently to address communication issues and elicit critical feedback
across campus, including information from colleagues on the faculty, in
other administrative departments, in residence halls, and other areas
in each of our institutions.
Even the best-managed institutions cannot completely eliminate the
risk of a catastrophe. But by addressing such risks thoughtfully,
institutions can increase their preparedness. When a concerned parent
called me on the morning of September 11th, he asked, ``How are YOU
going to protect my daughter?'' My reaction was genuine. ``Sir, we have
not been able to protect the Pentagon today.'' You can see how it would
be irresponsible of higher education to make any promises in terms of
our ability to absolutely protect the safety of each and every student.
As Student Affairs professionals play a significant role in
establishing and implementing effective systems which successfully
address a large majority of situations, we still face significant
challenges regarding the mental health of our students. While we work
with the boundaries and expectations of current laws the focus must be
on education and understanding the varied individual student priorities
as well as the different communities and campus cultures which exist.
As educators, we, too, are always learning and are committed to
improving our institutional systems.
Our college campuses are places that encourage free and open
discussions and intellectual debate. We have come to treasure their
open borders and the freedoms they give our young people as they
develop into productive young adults. We cannot begin to close down
that access. We cannot change the very nature of these institutions in
our attempts to protect our children. According to a recent issue of
U.S. News and World Report (April 30, 2007) despite the massive numbers
of students enrolled and the growing diversity of our campus
environments, college and university campuses remain among the safest
places in America. Student affairs professionals in many roles and
responsibilities work tirelessly and partner assertively across many
institutional lines to contribute to a very positive and productive
learning environment for all students.
Thank you for this opportunity to represent the very important
roles embraced by my colleagues on campuses across the country and
around the world.
______
Chairman Miller. Thank you to all of you for your testimony
and for your participation.
I would like to pose a question to Mr. Healy and to Dr.
Cornell, if I might.
I think the suggestions made here and the suggestions that
others have made to other committees sort of tell us that a lot
of different things have to be done. There is not a single
answer here, and you have all alluded to that aspect.
On this question, Dr. Cornell, of the threat assessments,
what intrigues me is the idea that you sort of have an ongoing
learning process as you engage these students in the effort to
eradicate that threat or to assess the probabilities and deal
with the individual cases, as you have done in the Memphis
schools. It seems to me that you have somewhat of an adaptive
model here where you are sort of continuously learning and
improving about students on campus, be it high school and/or
college.
I notice, Chief Healy, in your statement, you talk about,
as one of the recommendations, aggressive leads to promote
IACLEA's threat and risk assessment tool developed through the
Department of Homeland Security. You mentioned that you did
some of your work through safe and drug free schools, and I
just wondered: If we are here to help, how do we work to build
a synergy into that process? Because it seems to me that it is
a model. The threat assessment and risk reduction is a model
that can work both in elementary secondary schools and in
college. I do not know if I am correct in that, but that is my
assumption. I will just ask if you might comment on that. You
sort of both came to the same conclusion, and I just----
Mr. Healy. Yes, sir.
As to the first part, I want to make sure I make a
distinction between the IACLEA threat and risk assessment and
then the behavioral threat assessment because there are some
differences in the two.
The IACLEA threat and risk assessment tool primarily deals
with physical security threats, and it has a decidedly all-
hazards approach, so it deals with a whole spectrum of threats.
The other point that I made in my statement was that we needed
to expand the previous studies that have been done on the K
through 12 rampage shooting incidents to colleges and to
universities.
Last week, I met with the Secret Service and the FBI to
solicit their assistance in trying to expand those studies that
have been done, which are very good studies, by the way, but
they are not campus-focused. So what we are asking them to do
is to review ten past shooting incidents that have occurred on
college and university campuses and to apply the same
methodology, and hopefully, some of those best practices will
be the same, but we believe that there are some nuances because
colleges and universities are obviously different from K
through 12 settings.
Mr. Cornell. Let me just say that, when the FBI and the
Secret Service recommended that schools have threat assessment
teams, most educators had no idea what they were talking about
because threat assessment is a law enforcement concept, and it
needs to be an education concept as well, but schools are
learning; schools had to learn to develop crisis response
plans, and now every school has a crisis response plan. Well,
prevention is different than crisis response. Prevention starts
long before you have a gunman in your parking lot.
So what we need to move schools to is the process of now
recognizing that they also need a threat assessment program in
their schools. Threat assessment ought to be a part of every
school's comprehensive safety plan that starts with prevention
and works right up through the crisis and the aftermath of a
crisis, but with threat assessment, we identify kids long
before they are armed. We identify them when they are victims
of bullying, when they are depressed, when they are developing
symptoms of mental illness, when they are in conflicts
repeatedly that frighten their peers and frighten their
teachers, and we take a problem-solving approach to identify
those problems and to resolve them early.
If you look back at the history of the kids who have
committed school shootings, both in colleges and off college
campuses and communities, we see these kids in middle school
having repeated serious mental health and adjustment problems;
we see them in high school having problems, but what we do not
have is sort of the infrastructure and the orientation that
they are communicating a threat, that that threat signifies a
problem and that we need to intervene and work to resolve that
problem.
Chairman Miller. If I just might--my time is running here.
You cite that the Memphis City public schools have been able to
resolve more than 200 threats. I assume that includes a
successful referral to some support service for problems that
that student is encountering.
Mr. Cornell. Absolutely.
Chairman Miller. So they have built up a base of referral
services?
Mr. Cornell. They ask us to come and teach them the threat
assessment model. They adapt it for their urban, large public
school system. When students made very serious threats, they
were referred to their central mental health organization
within the school system. They did an assessment and came up
with an individual plan for each student. It might involve the
referral to an alternative school, a referral for mental health
treatment, conflict resolution, a variety of different
interventions individualized to that student to resolve the
problem that they were having, okay? And they had 200 cases in
their first year, all of which they were able to resolve.
Chairman Miller. Thank you very much.
Mr. McKeon.
Mr. McKeon. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I thank each of you for your testimony. This is a very
serious issue all of the different kinds of disasters that
could confront us, and then there are the different sizes of
schools and the areas that they are located in--their
geography. Trying to deal with this from Washington, D.C. kind
of boggles my mind.
Could each of you tell us what size your school is? We will
start with Mr. Healy.
Mr. Healy. Yes, sir.
We have 4,200 undergraduate students, 2,000 graduate
students and approximately 5,500 staff and faculty, so we are a
community of about 12,000 people.
Mr. McKeon. In what kind of a setting?
Mr. Healy. We are in a--I call it a suburban sitting on
steroids. Congressman Holt can attest to that as well. We are
also located on approximately 600 acres, and we have 160
buildings.
Mr. McKeon. Okay. Dr. Kennedy.
Ms. Kennedy. At Cal State Northridge, we have 34,000
students on 369 acres with about 200 buildings. We are in a
suburban setting. The campus is open on various sides with
public safety people in the entrances but also with temporary
people in those entrances as well.
Mr. Cornell. The University of Virginia has over 20,000
students, but we have trained schools with as few as 20
students to schools as large as the Memphis City public schools
where they have 270 schools.
Ms. Walbert. Arcadia University is in a suburb of
Philadelphia. We have 55 acres, 3,400 students, about 300 to
400 employees who are there full-time, and we also own some
property adjacent to campus but not on that network of 55
acres.
Mr. McKeon. Dr. Cornell, you said you have trained schools
with as few as 20----
Mr. Cornell. Yes.
Mr. McKeon [continuing]. And as large as 270----
Mr. Cornell. 270 schools with, you know, thousands of
students.
Mr. McKeon. Each of you come from very large schools. You
would have the resources to have the safety personnel and the
security personnel. A school of 20 people, what could they do
in the way of setting up a program?
Mr. Cornell. In each school, there is an administrator, a
principal; there is a psychologist or counselor, and there is a
law enforcement officer and maybe a law enforcement officer
from the community who is a liaison. As long as you have
covered those three bases, you can have a team that deals with
the issues in your school.
Mr. McKeon. In dealing with your colleagues from around the
country and in working on these programs, do you feel that we
are doing a fairly good job of this on these campuses, at these
schools?
Mr. Healy. As other witnesses have stated today, I think we
do a really good job of preventing, and we never hear the
stories of prevention. I would say that we do need to take the
lessons that we have learned from the K through 12 studies, and
there have been significant resources dedicated to studying K
through 12 situations. We have not done the same for colleges
and universities, and I really urge you to consider funding
research by the Secret Service and by the FBI so we can take
the K through 12 model and adapt it for the college and
university environment. Our environments are vastly different,
and we do not have the same control over students as they do in
the K through 12 environment, so I think it is very important
that we understand that, while there is work that the Secret
Service and the FBI have done on the K through 12 issues, we
really need to adapt that for the college and university
environment.
Mr. McKeon. Now, the Secret Service and the FBI would be
looking at what kind of disasters or potential disasters?
Mr. Healy. Specifically, we are talking about the active
shooter situations. The study that I am citing is the Secret
Service Safe Schools Initiative and the FBI threat assessment
model, and those models are the models that I suggest that we
take an additional, more deliberative look at the campus
scenario and see how those lessons apply.
Mr. McKeon. Then the earthquake, the Katrina-type disaster,
the disaster that happened just recently in Kansas with the
tornado, all of those kinds of things would be excluded from
that. That would also require some effort and some kind of a
program to assess those problems, too.
Mr. Healy. Yes, sir. The IACLEA threat and risk assessment
tool that was funded by DHS is a great document that really
allows campuses to take a holistic examination of all of their
vulnerabilities, and it is an all-hazards approach, and so we
believe that this document is a very strong document. We also
have a campus preparedness resource center that is located on
our Web site where colleges and universities can download model
emergency operations plans. So there have been considerable
investments made in the all-hazards approach. Of course, we can
always do more.
Mr. McKeon. Can I have just one short follow-up on that?
We have about 6,000 just higher ed schools that participate
in the Federal financial programs and then they go K through
12. Do these schools all know of this Web site, of this
availability?
Mr. Healy. We are doing everything that we can to make sure
that they know. We represent approximately 1,100 higher ed
institutions. Any college or university can access that
information. We do not exclude any.
Mr. McKeon. It is just getting the word out.
Mr. Healy. Exactly, sir.
Mr. McKeon. Thank you very much.
Chairman Miller. Mr. Kildee.
Mr. Kildee. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Healy, I am addressing this question to you as the
President of the International Association of Campus Law
Enforcement Administrators.
In my city of Flint, we have two prominent universities--
Kettering and, exactly 1 mile away, the Flint campus of the
University of Michigan.
In Michigan, private institutions of higher education do
not have the authority to establish a Department of Public
Safety composed of sworn police officers. So, at the University
of Michigan, they have a fine department of public safety with
a number of police officers all trained, all sworn. At
Kettering, they do not have that. That must vary throughout the
country. Princeton is a private institution. Yet, you have your
own police department.
Are these sworn officers?
Mr. Healy. Yes, sir. My department is what we call a
``hybrid department.'' we are partly--50 percent are sworn
police officers. The other half are nonsworn public safety
officers.
Mr. Kildee. They are sworn, and they work for Princeton?
Mr. Healy. Yes, sir, they work for Princeton. What you
find, sir, is, across the country, based on whatever the State
law is, the State law will dictate whether a private or a
public institution can actually have sworn police officers at
their institutions.
Mr. Kildee. You answered my question. I was going to ask
that. That varies then from State to State. So the State of
Michigan could authorize that of the University of Detroit, a
Jesuit institution, or Kettering. We have a large number of
private institutions in Michigan.
So, in your organization then, you would find two types of
police forces--one for the public institutions and others for
the private institutions?
Mr. Healy. Yes, sir. Really, the distinctions that we make
are between the sworn officers--the police officers--and the
nonsworn officers. Again, I think, if you were to take a survey
across the country, you would see that it is about 50/50. About
50 percent of the institutions have sworn law enforcement
officers while 50 percent have nonsworn security officers. In
fact, some institutions actually contract their security
services to companies, to local police, to state police. So we
are a very diverse community, but we believe that many of the
tools that we are providing to these institutions allow them to
enhance their public safety posture regardless of whether they
are sworn or nonsworn.
Mr. Kildee. But as there is a mixture throughout the
country, in some States, a private institution could have its
own department of public safety and could have the power to
swear them in as full police officers?
Mr. Healy. Yes, sir. I have worked in three States; New
Jersey, Massachusetts and New York. In each of those States,
private institutions were able to have police departments.
Mr. Kildee. Thank you very much.
I yield back, Mr. Chairman. Thank you.
Chairman Miller. Mr. Keller.
Mr. Keller. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Dr. Cornell, who would you consider to be two or three of
the leading experts in the country when it comes to threat
assessments for mass murders if we wanted to hear from those
folks?
Mr. Cornell. I would prefer to give you a somewhat longer
list than their credentials and depending on their orientation,
and but I would certainly speak with folks from the Secret
Service and from the FBI, who both have excellent----
Mr. Keller. I do not need a list. I am pretty familiar with
who they are. Have you heard of Dr. Park Dietz?
Mr. Cornell. Sure, I know Dr. Dietz.
Mr. Keller. Do you recognize him as a world leading expert
in the area of threat assessment?
Mr. Cornell. Yes.
Mr. Keller. He testified in the John Hinckley case and in
the Jeffrey Dahmer case.
Mr. Cornell. Yes.
Mr. Keller. Are you familiar with John Douglas, the former
head of the FBI's Behavioral Science Unit?
Mr. Cornell. Yes.
Mr. Keller. Do you consider him an expert on things like
profiling and threat assessment?
Mr. Cornell. I do not know him as well as Dr. Dietz.
Mr. Keller. Okay. Are you familiar with Dr. Jamie Fox at
the Northeastern University in Boston?
Mr. Cornell. Yes.
Mr. Keller. Is he someone who is familiar and who is an
expert in this area?
Mr. Cornell. Yes.
Mr. Keller. Okay. Isn't there somebody at the University of
Virginia who is sort of famous? I believe he has a MacArthur
Foundation grant, and the name escapes me.
Mr. Cornell. Dr. John Monahan.
Mr. Keller. Dr. John Monahan.
Do you consider him a leading expert?
Mr. Cornell. Yes.
Mr. Keller. Okay. I am familiar with all of those issues
based on my prior work in dealing with mass murders, and I have
spoken in depth with all of them.
My concern is if we lined all of them up--and by the way,
those are the four I would consider to be the leading experts
in the world on threat assessment for mass murders--and I said,
``here are some facts about these three students who are
freshman at a school, and they are all narcissistic, and they
are all sort of crazy, and I want you to tell me if 4 years
from now these four students will commit violence,'' I would
submit to you that none of them would be able to predict with
mathematical certainty 4 years later which ones would commit
violence who have a pretty good idea if violence is going to
happen within a couple of hours based on recent and specific
threats, but I think it would be very difficult for them to
predict 4 years later that one of these students, based on what
they have heard, is going to commit violence.
Is that fair to say?
Mr. Cornell. That is very fair to say. That is profiling as
opposed to threat assessment.
Mr. Keller. All right. So my concern is that we could spend
a bunch of money on threat assessment and teaching students and
school officials in this area, but if the world's leading
experts are not going to be able to predict violence 3 or 4
years down the road, I am not sure these students are. What I
think--and I will be happy to also ask Mr. Healy about this--is
that the keys for threat assessment and for preventing mass
murders on college campuses are three.
First, there must be systems at places on every single
college campus that would allow the students and the faculty
and the dorm advisors to be able to talk to someone about a
troubled student in a confidential, anonymous manner so they
are not afraid of being killed.
Two, that college must have some system in place that that
report of a threat doesn't fall through the cracks. And, three,
that college must have the ability to take action to remove
that student where appropriate without fear of being sued by
that student or his family.
Mr. Healy, do you want to address that?
Mr. Healy. Yes, sir. I think you just described the
behavioral threat assessment model. This is the model that we
are recommending; this is the model that the FBI recommends in
their threat assessment process. All of these systems are
obviously very necessary in our environments. You have to have
ways for people to speak in confidentiality. That is part of
the threat assessment model. You have to have ways for everyone
in the community to identify and then report actions that are
troubling for a particular reason, and then you have to have an
ability to take action to either get help for an individual, or
if that individual needs to be removed from the community, to
remove him from the community.
Mr. Keller. Let us take Princeton, for example. You have a
freshman sitting in class, and he makes a statement overheard
by one of his peers that, man, I really hate this teacher. I
would like to kill him some day. And I don't like Sally sitting
in the front row because she is a teacher's pet; maybe I should
take her with him.
What system would be in place for that student who
overhears that to report to the appropriate Princeton official?
Mr. Healy. I think that that individual would feel very
comfortable talking either with their RA or their dean. We have
residential college systems, so I think they would feel very
comfortable speaking with their dean in their residential
college or with their director of studies.
Mr. Keller. Anonymously even, to protect themselves if they
have to?
Mr. Healy. Yes, sir.
Mr. Keller. What system is in place to make sure once that
resident or official hears it, that it doesn't fall through the
cracks?
Mr. Healy. That information would be shared with the dean
of students office. If we needed to convene a team to discuss
that particular action--I doubt if we would in that particular
situation--but if we needed to do that, we have a system in
place to do that.
Mr. Keller. Finally, would there be concerns about you
being sued by the student or their family who made that weird
sort of threat?
Mr. Healy. There are always concerns about being sued, but
I don't think that stops us from taking action when action
needs to be taken.
Mr. Keller. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. My time has expired.
Chairman Miller. Mr. Andrews.
Mr. Andrews. I thank the witnesses for their testimony.
Mr. Healy, we are very proud of New Jersey to have a great
university like Princeton within our borders, and we thank you
for being here this morning.
You talk about your organization's creation of standards
and the application of those standards to a certification
process, and you make particular reference on page 3 of your
testimony for the need for mass emergency notification systems
that have appropriate capacity, security redundancy and
reliance to reach your community members in a hurry; so a
texting system or cell phone system.
Do you think that this committee--I won't ask you to
testify for your organization, but do you think this committee
should require that colleges and universities receive
certification from an organization such as yours in order to
receive Federal support? Should we require this kind of
certification?
Mr. Healy. Sir, I believe that our accreditation program is
in its infant stages, and I would like to think that at some
point down the line, maybe 10, 20 years, that the program would
be mature enough to then mandate accreditation standards for
all campus public safety agencies. As you know, accrediting for
institutions has been around for a very long time. Our program
has not been around that long, and I wouldn't suggest that we
jump into mandating it at this early stage.
Mr. Andrews. Do you think States or Federal Governments
should mandate campuses to have the kind of emergency
communication systems that you cite?
Mr. Healy. I think that campuses and universities should
surely evaluate their needs and implement systems that meet all
of the parameters that I cited in my statement. Obviously I
think that is a very important initiative. Whether a State
should mandate that, I don't really know.
Mr. Andrews. In your years of experience in campus
security, have you ever run across a situation where the
student privacy laws have precluded you from gaining or sharing
information you thought was necessary to protect the campus?
Mr. Healy. Sir, we are always concerned about FERPA, the
Buckley amendment and also the HIPAA provisions. I can tell you
that there are exceptions for law enforcement emergencies and
health and safety emergencies in FERPA, and so that hasn't
affected, but I know my colleagues at the universities are
often concerned about that.
Mr. Andrews. In your own experience have you used those
exceptions to share information with interested parties?
Mr. Healy. Absolutely.
Mr. Andrews. Has there ever been a situation where you have
wanted to use that information but felt precluded because legal
counsel told you you couldn't?
Mr. Healy. Not that I can recollect, sir.
Mr. Andrews. Dr. Cornell, I am very impressed by what you
had to say, and I wanted to cite one thing in particular on
page 3, talking about mental illness issues for students. You
say: Our Nation suffers from poor insurance coverage for mental
health services and from poor communication and coordination
among these services. Even when we know someone needs
treatment, there is no effective mechanism to make sure the
treatment is delivered and no follow-up to make sure it was
effective. College campuses see a substantial number of
students with serious mental health problems, yet their
staffing levels and resources are focused on short-term
counseling.
One of the bills that this committee will be considering is
a bill sponsored by Congressman Kennedy from Rhode Island and
Congressman Ramstad from Minnesota which would require health
insurance companies to offer mental health services on the same
basis on which they offer physical health services. So if there
is a $500 deductible for a broken leg, there can't be a $15,000
deductible for someone seeking treatment for bipolar disorder.
Do you think we should adopt such legislation?
Mr. Cornell. I am not entirely familiar with the bill, but
I strongly support the concept that mental health services
should be treated with parity with so-called physical. The
distinction between physical and mental disorders is more in
appearance than in substance. The more we learn about
disorders, the more we understand that there are both physical
and psychological components to all of these disorders.
Mr. Andrews. I agree with you, and I think it would be
sadly ironic if we had a good system in place that identified
students who are troubled and took appropriate legal action to
deal with them and then didn't have the resources to deal with
their problems, and their problems wound up manifesting
themselves in violence. I, by the way, do not mean to imply
that students who need mental health services are always, often
or even sometimes violent, but sometimes it does lead to this.
Mr. Chairman, I know that is one of the issues that we are
looking at in our jurisdiction. Thank you very much.
Chairman Miller. Thank you.
Mr. Davis.
Mr. Davis of Tennessee. Thank you for being with us today.
I appreciate each one of your testimony.
Mr. Healy, I would like to start with you. You talked about
the accreditation program. If you could tell me how many
institutions have actually applied for accreditation.
Mr. Healy. We currently have 11 institutions that are in
our accreditation program. The program, again, is still in its
infant stages.
Mr. Davis of Tennessee. Could you expand a little bit on
some of the standards that will be evaluated in your
accreditation process?
Mr. Healy. Yes, sir. The standards, there are approximately
225 standards. They range from the certification of the
officers all the way to the crime prevention practices that you
are required to implement as a result of the program. So it is
kind of a broad range. It includes critical incident response,
communications systems, dispatching services, training in crime
prevention, obviously compliance with the Clery Act. So those
are kind of a broad range.
They are basically broken down into four different
categories: administration, operations and patrol,
investigations, and then crime prevention.
Mr. Davis of Tennessee. Thank you.
I would like to ask this of each of you, if you would:
Given the tragic events that took place at Virginia Tech and
then the other events like the earthquakes and tornadoes and
hurricanes, if each one of you could just tell me if you are
taking time to reevaluate your safety programs, and if so, what
you are doing.
Ms. Walbert. We certainly are, and I think most
institutions are using any incident that occurs for an
opportunity to review what it is we need to know, whether it is
about how we communicate with our constituents, how we respond
to individual situations. Each of those items take away
sometimes time from doing some of the other things that are
very important to intervene. At the same time, we learn from
every situation, and we can build on what has come before us on
our own campuses, recognizing the communities that we are in.
Mr. Davis of Tennessee. Thank you.
Dr. Cornell.
Mr. Cornell. I am not here representing the University of
Virginia.
Ms. Kennedy. I think one of the things we put in place are
emergency systems, and we also do scenarios related to the
shooter incidents or natural disaster incidents. Each of the
campuses, the 23 campuses within the CSU, take part in these
activities. We also have the crisis intervention piece together
with the student affairs, the public safety people and others,
and there are practice sessions that go on. Because we are also
concerned about natural disasters, each of the departments and
areas maintain a supply of water, food and safety equipment at
the local level so that in the event of any kind of a disaster
where people have to--are looking for those kinds of things,
that they can be found in multiple locations.
Mr. Davis of Tennessee. Thank you.
Mr. Healy. Yes, sir. Again, I do think that all
institutions are taking a step back to evaluate their emergency
management plans. I know that we have done that at my
institution. Because I obviously monitor the list for our
association, I know that all institutions are concerned about
this. We are very fortunate that we have in IACLEA a model
emergency operations plan so that when institutions are
evaluating their own plans, or if they are just starting to
write a plan, they don't have to start from ground zero; they
can use the our model plan and also use our incident command
training, which is very important as well. It is important for
multiple agencies to be able to respond in an effective and
seamless fashion, and our incident command training allows
that, and we are rolling that out around the country.
Mr. Davis of Tennessee. Do you work collaboratively with
colleagues across your States or across the country and work on
best practices and benchmarking and those type things that you
would do in business?
Ms. Walbert. I would say absolutely. NASPA and the other
professional associations that I represent today provide all
sorts of educational opportunities where we share our best
practices, we challenge one another. We think about the
differences that we each bring, as were mentioned earlier, in
terms of the types of campuses that we have, learning about
alcohol-related issues, mental health issues, the legal
aspects. We learn as much from one another who have experienced
other things as we do from conversations and educational
opportunities.
Mr. Davis of Tennessee. Thank you.
Chairman Miller. Mr. Scott.
Mr. Scott. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Dr. Cornell, is there a consensus in your field that
substantially more research needs to be done in violence
prevention?
Mr. Cornell. There certainly is.
Mr. Scott. The threat to students, is the threat from other
students and staff or from the outside? From the events that
have occurred, how many have occurred from someone outside of
the college community coming in and creating the threat, and
how much of it is within the college community?
Mr. Cornell. Well, certainly both are of concern, and
perhaps Mr. Healy could address this more definitively than I,
but my understanding is that most of the college campus crime
occurs from outside of the formal campus.
Mr. Scott. Mr. Healy.
Mr. Healy. Sir, if you are specifically addressing what we
would consider an active shooter or rampage shooting incident,
of the ones we have identified, it is about 50-50; 50 percent
have been conducted by outsiders, another 50 percent by people
who are within the community. I would like to note, however,
that the age difference is very variable in the college and
university environment. Many of the active shooters have been
either graduate students or much older.
Mr. Scott. Dr. Cornell, we have gone back and forth about
your ability to identify which individual might in the future
cause a problem. Everyone with a mental health issue is not a
threat to public safety. You indicated a difference between
threat assessment and profiling. Can you elaborate on that?
Mr. Cornell. Thank you for bringing this up. This is a very
important distinction. All of the experts that Congressman
Keller cited are important experts, and I think all of them
would agree with me that threat assessment and profiling are
different procedures. Profiling involves looking for long-term
predictions, trying to see far into the future based on an
individual's background and characteristics.
The FBI's own profiling unit, including John Douglas,
concluded that profiling was not appropriate for school
shooters, but they recommended threat assessment, which is a
more immediate procedure that identifies individuals who have
identified themselves by virtue of making a threat or engaging
in some kind of threatening behavior.
We have much more success at distinguishing individuals who
have made threats and how serious and dangerous they are than
individuals who are involved in profiling. Dr. Deitz, for
example, has a threat assessment business that he operates, so
certainly he endorses the concept of threat assessment. So this
is an important distinction and one that we emphasize in our
training.
Mr. Scott. In high schools bullying is a major issue in
terms of violence prevention. Is that as much a problem in
college?
Mr. Cornell. Bullying probably peaks in middle school and
declines through adolescence, but bullying, social bullying, is
still a very prominent issue in colleges. Individuals segregate
themselves into social groups, individuals come to feel
alienated and withdrawn, and we see the development of adult
mental illnesses in those years that complicate the bullying
problem.
Mr. Scott. Expulsion in high school is often
counterproductive. Is it as much a counterproductive issue in
college?
Mr. Cornell. It certainly is for the students.
Mr. Scott. What about for public safety? If you expel a
high school student, they are out in the street and can cause
as much aggravation out there. Is there as much of a problem
for public safety for the college students if you expel too
often?
Mr. Cornell. Absolutely. Expulsion is sort of a short-term
solution for the school, but it is not a solution for the
student or the community as a whole.
Mr. Scott. What problems happen when you expel people
unnecessarily?
Mr. Cornell. The American Psychological Association's Task
Force on Zero Tolerance looked at expulsion research and found
basically it is associated with declining achievement and a
higher dropout rate among the individuals that are expelled. It
does not improve the safety of the school or the climate in the
school, so it is not a very effective solution.
Mr. Scott. Thank you.
Mr. Healy, you mentioned communication. Some things cost a
lot of money, some things don't. Do most college student have
cell phones?
Mr. Healy. Yes, sir.
Mr. Scott. Virtually all have computers.
Mr. Healy. Yes, sir.
Mr. Scott. You can send a message out instantaneously; is
that right?
Mr. Healy. Yes, sir. Most of the systems that are currently
on the market are instantaneous.
Mr. Scott. If you send out an alert like something at
Virginia Tech, what would the alert say, and what would the
students do?
Mr. Healy. Sir, I don't want to address specifically what
they did or what they could have done there. I know in our
situation we would try to send information to advise
individuals what to do as a situation unfolds. Again, these
messages--and as situations evolve, that is why it is so
important to have a system that you can push out information as
quickly as possible because of repeated information and updated
information. Again, this would serve as a way to provide
information so that people can take steps to do what it is that
you need them to do, but also to control rumors and try to
maintain a sense of order on campus.
Sir, unfortunately, there are a lot of companies in the
wake of the very tragic incident of Virginia Tech, a lot of
fly-by-night companies out there, and it is very unfortunate.
That is why it is very important for colleges and universities
to understand what the features of those systems are so that
they are not throwing their money away.
Chairman Miller. Mr. Boustany.
Mr. Boustany. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
First a few comments and then a question. It seems to me
that we don't want to create a Federal bureaucracy to deal with
this, and given the diversity of so many institutions and size
and locations and so forth, having those institutions develop
multidisciplinary plans that are very comprehensive, that
incorporate elements from the community would be important, as
you have all mentioned.
You have all given very excellent testimony and answered
some very good questions with very informative answers.
Certainly plans would include threat assessment,
prevention, response, and oftentimes with plans, when they have
to be implemented, they don't really work as well as everyone
would hope. We saw this in my home State of Louisiana after
both Hurricanes Rita and Katrina. And scenario planning and so
forth, exercises I think are also very important.
One question I have, and Mr. Andrews raised the issue of
mental health, every community is plagued with the lack of
mental health resources across this country. We all know about
the disparity in the way insurance treats it. These issues we
are going to try to deal with as we go forward.
But it struck me as I was listening that our universities
and colleges have a resource that we may be underutilizing, and
that is virtually all have psychological departments, and are
those psychological departments being utilized in a more
extensive way in a counseling process; as you look at your
plans and go through prevention and so forth, are you using
those resources to the fullest extent on campus?
Ms. Walbert. I think it is important that there is a
distinction made between the role that the psychology faculty
play in teaching and the role we talked about in counseling. It
is very clear a faculty member who is an expert clinical
psychologist not be in a counseling relationship with a student
that they are teaching. On a campus like ours, our psychology
program is very strong, and when we have had emergencies, we
have used the expertise that exists on that psychology faculty
to help us think about other resources and relationships that
we have, but we do not use them directly for the counseling
role with the students.
Mr. Boustany. I would ask that that might be considered and
look at possible best practices, share your information,
because it may be worthwhile. It just seems to me that this is
a resource on our campuses that may be underutilized in this
effort. I do recognize the difference between research and
teaching versus clinical psychology, but just about every
campus does have clinical psychology and counseling, master's
programs in counseling, which is a clinical discipline.
It just seems to me that that is an area that we need to
look at a little bit more and maybe share some best practices.
Ms. Walbert. Sir, if I may, I do believe that we really
need to be very cautious on that matter, in large measure
because of the confidentiality of the relationship if the
faculty member is also in a position to grade a student. The
systems that we need need to be built around the network for
the student free from that academic pressure. So using them as
resources and experts is critical in terms of any of the
faculty on our campuses, psychology, including other areas as
well.
Mr. Boustany. I understand that potential conflict, but it
seems to me that there should be a little bit more
investigation into--any campus as to how those resources could
be used.
Dr. Cornell, do you have any comments, being a
psychologist?
Mr. Cornell. Yes. Obviously you are correct that there are
some academic psychologists who would not be prepared or
trained to do clinical counseling, but at the University of
Virginia we have clinical psychologists who also work in a
clinic that does provide counseling and clinical services to
the student population and the general community, so it can be
worked out. There are complications, as Dr. Walbert mentions,
but I think in many universities the clinical psychologists on
the ground also are involved in some capacity with their mental
health services.
Mr. Boustany. Thank you.
Dr. Kennedy.
Ms. Kennedy. Within the CSU we have a comment that we
consider to be odd students, and we don't mention the student's
name. And we bring together public safety, counseling, people
from the clinical psych area to talk about student A, for
example, and to bring together all the information that we
have, and then to try to identify what would be a plan relative
to that, and then that gets carried out in a designated way
depending on the degree of threat. I think that is quite
common. I know within the CSU it is a common practice.
Mr. Boustany. Thank you.
I would just say, given the paucity of mental health
services really nationwide and from community to community, we
ought to leverage everything we have as we look at this effort.
I thank you all.
Chairman Miller. Thank you.
Ms. Clarke.
Ms. Clarke. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
Americans once had a sense of security in the basic
institutions that were important in their lives. We used to
think our churches and our schools were safe. Recently the
tragic events at Virginia Tech have yet again reduced whatever
semblance of sense of safety we had left.
Equally as tragic is the daily violence encountered by
students in our inner-city schools. In New York City alone,
which is where I am from, there are a reported 654 serious
incidents in schools categorized as persistently dangerous
schools. These acts of violence point to the larger problem of
school safety both at the secondary and postsecondary level and
points to the importance of the creation of threat assessment
teams of mental health professionals, educators, social service
workers, law enforcement officials and others in key strategy
in averting potential dangerous incidents.
In fact, since the Columbine incident in 1999, much of the
school safety literature has stressed the importance of schools
forming these types of broad-based threat assessment teams to
analyze threats and campus safety. However, schools seem to be
a bit reluctant not only in the creation of such teams, but
also on the creation and implementation of student alert
systems.
I want to direct my questions to the entire panel. I am
looking at what has happened in New York City and how we can
engage our educational communities in emergency preparedness
and sort of expecting the unexpected. After 9/11 we had a lot
of schools in the area of the World Trade Center, and after 9/
11 it seems as though that level of consciousness has still not
quite awoken.
For instance, New York City passed--well, the mayor
basically passed a public school cell phone ban, so the types
of messaging that you would talk about in the event of an
emergency is not available to public school students,
particularly high school students, and there is a concern about
whether that technology is good in a public school setting, or
does it present a larger threat in terms of violent
interactions during the school day or after with gang members
and things of that nature, sort of creating that balance.
But how do we create a consciousness within the educational
community and surrounding communities around expecting the
unexpected, using threat assessment as a tool in an urban
environment? Can I just ask you folks, particularly those of
you who have larger environments in which you work or have had
that experience?
Mr. Healy. Ma'am, I believe that one of the ways that we do
that is through professional associations like my own, by
creating a sense of the awareness of what is available and
making it easier for institutions to develop their emergency
management plans. I don't think that there is any institution
out there that doesn't want to engage in emergency management
planning, it is just such a daunting task, and that is why
resources like we attempted to provide in IACLEA are very
helpful to help facilitate and move the process along.
I do think that it is a critical role for the professional
associations to reach out to their membership to ensure that
they understand. It is also important for us to work together,
and that is why we are constantly trying to develop closer
relationships so that I can present at a NASPA conference and
talk about the importance of emergency management, and someone
at NASPA can present at one of our conferences, talking about
working together with the student affairs professionals. So I
think it has to be a collaborative approach.
Mr. Cornell. Schools really have a tremendous burden, and
with No Child Left Behind, many responsibilities that have to
do with academic achievement and accomplishments there, and
that is their first priority, and so it is sometimes difficult
to provide them with the time, the energy and the funding to
think about crisis response and threat assessment, which I see
as two separate components.
The Office of Safe and Drug-Free Schools, that funding is
really critically important to schools being able to implement
programs. In almost every school division that we have gone to,
we have gone to 12 States, gone to hundreds of different
schools, they use that Safe and Drug-Free Schools money to do
their threat assessment training, to do their bullying
prevention. And when that money is threatened, those programs
go away.
Ms. Kennedy. Yes, I wanted to respond, too.
Within the CSU, given that we have almost half a million
students that we are serving, and we also provide services to
our local education, K-12 educational systems as well, one of
the things that we do is we do provide violence, antiviolence
training within the public schools. We do principals' training
in the same way. And everyone within the system is trained to
try to prepare themselves for disaster.
The difficulty always is that you are prepared for the last
disaster, and that when you mention the ability to plan for the
unexpected, it is just not possible. You can put all the tools
together, and you can bring that emergency preparedness action
and crisis management to the event at hand, but I think it is
very difficult to anticipate some of the things that actually
do happen.
Ms. Clarke. I think sort of key to responding is to have a
tool that enables people to act. New York City decided to ban
cell phones in its schools, and there has been a real debate
around whether, in fact, it facilitates being able to address
an emergency or it creates a crisis situation for those who
would use it as a tool in order to promote some sort of violent
action. Any response to that?
Ms. Walbert. I would just say that we have had to
communicate all the decades we have been around. Thinking about
the best way to communicate is essential. We used to hang
signs. That was all we had. Now we have other tools. But to
assess whether or not they will accomplish the primary purpose
in that particular case, that needs to be done in advance. That
is how we can prepare to think about which tools we would use
under which circumstances and what makes the most sense.
Mr. Healy. I would just add, ma'am, that, of course, no one
method is best. I think it really has to include several
different methodologies and modes of communication. Some of
those methods are as simple as hanging a sign, but obviously we
have to continue to evolve as the technology evolves. We have
to continue to add layers on so that we are then able to
communicate.
I think obviously with the issue around cell phones in K-
through-12 schools, that is an issue that has to be resolved.
But cell phones are not the only way. I think K-through-12
schools are much smaller than colleges and universities, much
more contained. I think just the word of mouth is a very
effective tool as well.
Chairman Miller. The gentlewoman's time has expired.
Mr. Heller.
Mr. Heller. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I want to thank everyone here today. Great discussion
today. I certainly do appreciate your input.
I wanted to direct some of my questions towards Ms.
Kennedy. How large did you say your campus was again?
Ms. Kennedy. Right now it is 34,000 students.
Mr. Heller. Thirty-four thousand students. You had to live
through earthquakes, and I understand how difficult that can
be. I went to the University of Southern California. But for
that reason I am looking at some of your issues and comments on
emergency preparation plans. How long would it take you to
evacuate your campus if you had to do so?
Ms. Kennedy. It would depend very much on the time of day,
the day of the week.
Chairman Miller. Maybe take a week at the wrong time of
day.
Ms. Kennedy. Depends on the traffic. I couldn't really say.
We have evacuated the campus at different times over utility
crises where we had no electricity. We evacuated--we have done
it over mudslides and other activities, and usually it has been
around--my own personal experience, it has been around 4:00 in
the afternoon, which means they can evacuate the campus, but
not the area.
Mr. Heller. Right, right. I didn't live through the Rodney
King riots at the University of Southern California campus, but
my sister-in-law did, and under that scenario they did try to
evacuate the campus and had a difficult time even in the middle
of the afternoon trying to get students off the campus. It was
in the middle of finals. They were in the library, they were on
campus, they were in their fraternities or sororities. Very,
very difficult for them to get that evacuation and get that
completed, and very concerned.
In your emergency preparation plans, have you determined
how long it would take to contact 100 percent of your students
under an emergency situation?
Ms. Kennedy. In an emergency situation we actually have a
system of public address on the top of every building on the
entire campus and including in the dorm areas, and so we can do
a public address telling people where to go. We have automatic
systems that go to the cell phones and go--not the cell phones,
to the computers, everybody's individual account, giving them
instructions. And then we have teams of people that will be
located--that will move immediately to particular areas to tell
people what to do. Residential people have one set of issues,
the classrooms have another.
Mr. Heller. Very good.
Mr. Healy, you mentioned, or it has been mentioned,
obviously, the technology of the laptop, cell phones, and I
realize, as you mentioned, that no single technology is going
to be a fix-all. But I will tell you as you move forward in
this, and I think it is an intriguing idea, I would think that
you could expand that. For example, as a parent sitting here
with a child in the elementary school right now, that parent
would also be notified. But not only students on campus, but
those parents.
I think that is one of the biggest concerns of what came
out of the incident at Virginia Tech, was the lack of
communications. I think if not only were the students, but the
parents at the same time--I would love--if my child's
elementary school today had to be evacuated, I would love to
have that ring on my cell phone right now saying come pick up
my child.
Mr. Healy. Yes, sir. One of the factors that we will be
asking our peers and our other campus public safety executives
around the country as they look at purchasing such a system to
consider is whether parents should be added to the system. I
know, in fact, the system we have at Princeton actually started
in the K-through-12 environment primarily for parents and has
evolved into a system that is used in the higher ed. So I do
know that those systems are used widely in K through 12.
Mr. Heller. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
Chairman Miller. Thank you.
Mr. Yarmuth.
Mr. Yarmuth. I wanted to pursue the issue of the diversity
of campuses a little bit. I come from a district, metro
Louisville, and we have eight or nine different campuses, none
of which I would say resembles Virginia Tech in the sense that
they are very self-contained, very few residential students
anywhere. And I worked at the University of Louisville for 3
years, and it seemed to me that the approach to campus safety
there was more of like a community police force, a community
approach.
So I am interested in the idea that we are using a K-
through-12 model to talk about safety when, at least looking at
the variety of campuses in my community, it appears that it
resembles more of a workplace model than it does an educational
setting. Does that make this exercise meaningful in any
respect, because I understand at least three of you come from
large campuses. I don't know about Arcadia. We have campuses
that you really couldn't call them campuses, institutions that
are in high-rise office buildings. So it is exactly like a
workplace setting.
So I would like you to respond to how applicable these
standards are.
Mr. Healy. Yes, sir. That is why I think it is so important
that we expand the previous studies that have been conducted in
the K-through-12 environments to include campuses. I know I
have said that several times because I am really committed to
trying to make this happen. In fact, I mentioned that I met
with the FBI and the Secret Service to gauge their interest in
expanding their studies.
But I do think that there are some particular nuances in
college and university environments that may make some of the
recommendations and some of the behavioral threat assessment
models distinctively different in college and university
settings, so that is why I really urge you all, as you consider
funding for the Secret Service and the FBI or whomever, the
COPS bill, that we set aside some money for this research
because I think it is vitally important.
Ms. Kennedy. I would just like to say that for the CSU we
have small residential campuses as well as primarily commuter
campuses. For Cal State North, for example, of those 35,000,
only 2,200 are living on campus. The rest are living around, or
they are commuting in. That is why I mentioned earlier on the
time of day.
But what our emergency preparedness has done as a system is
to identify what are the needed systems that have to be in
place depending on what that campus looks like, and that is
what we have put in place. When we do the scenarios, the first
one that was done on the possibility of a shooter, active
shooter, was done at San Francisco State, which is an urban
setting. We will now repeat that in a residential setting and
in a mixed setting such as the one that I am most familiar
with.
So we are very conscious that a setting does create a
different kind of response.
Mr. Cornell. Again, there is an important distinction
between the crisis response and threat assessment. Crisis
response, the buildings matter a lot, and the location and what
you are going to do, but that is an immediate situation. Threat
assessment is prevention, and there the buildings matter less,
and the people matter more.
So when someone is engaged in threatening behavior, what is
important is that you interview that person, you interview the
witnesses, you contact the teachers, and you communicate among
your staff. So it is more person-oriented.
Now, threat assessment actually originated for workplace
violence and for protecting our President, who is moving all
over the world. So the issues of geography have been dealt with
and overcome, so I wouldn't want to think that because we have
got a model in K-through-12 schools, that we can't adopt it to
colleges, because it has been used in tougher environments even
than colleges already.
Ms. Walbert. I would just add that the community you
mentioned is critical on different size campuses, and
understanding what the community that the institution resides
in expects from that relationship is essential as well. We have
many commuter students that we would have very different
expectations of how we would contact them than the students
that live on campus. Many institutions, over 4,000
institutions, there are many different ways to pull those
groups together and identify the best way to communicate and
what the expectations of the students, the parents, the faculty
and the staff that are there really are.
Mr. Yarmuth. I guess I am just curious about how much the
fact that it is an educational institution changes the safety
dynamic in many of these institutions we are dealing with.
Ms. Walbert. I think that gives us an opportunity to engage
everyone in that environment, particularly at the collegiate
level, educating that students have a responsibility for what
happens in the community, to make that contact anonymously or
otherwise if they are concerned about a peer or someone else.
It gives us that leverage.
Very few of our missions actually say we will keep students
safe. We talk about education, we talk about the focus on the
long-term citizenship of those students. We do want it in a
safe environment.
Mr. Yarmuth. Thank you.
Chairman Miller. Mrs. Davis.
Mrs. Davis of California. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Thank you all for being here. I think it has been an
excellent discussion. You have talked--maybe this is to the
whole panel, but I think, Dr. Cornell, you have been speaking
about the crisis response versus threat assessment. Is there a
sense of proportionality here? If you were to look, all of
you--if you were to look at what campuses are doing, would you
be interested in knowing how much more in resources has been
put into security measures in buildings versus thinking about
the threat assessment, and what would that proportionality be?
How would it be if I went to my campus, several major campuses
in San Diego, for example, and asked them to tell me about
those issues and whether or not adequate resources were being
put into either one? How would you assess that? Is it equal, or
is it in truth something else?
Mr. Cornell. I would say most people think about crisis
response when they think about the active shooter incident
because that is very vivid and emotional, and they spend their
resources on that, and it is a more expensive process because
hiring security and equipment.
Threat assessment is much less expensive. You train your
staff, and they continue to do threat assessments. But I would
say it is probably 90 percent focused on crisis response and
security and much less on the sort of early prevention threat
assessment.
Mr. Healy. That is why I think it is so important for us to
have this conversation, because one of the things that we try
to tell our peers is that you do need an all-hazards approach.
We need to consider all of the risks that we potentially face.
Congressman Clarke was mentioning earlier it is hard to get
people to imagine the unimaginable. That is what I am here to
do. I have to help my institution, my peers have to help their
institutions, imagine the worst possible scenarios.
Now, that doesn't mean that you can plan or that you commit
resources for every possible scenario, but you have to look at
the likely, more probable scenarios and plan, and I do think
that obviously this conversation is an important conversation
and one in which we hope that people will begin to think not
just about critical incident response, but also about
behavioral threat assessment.
Ms. Walbert. I would agree with Mr. Healy, but I wouldn't
agree necessarily that everything is unimaginable. Many of the
things that we deal with are very real. Dealing with the
individual students in advance, reinforcing that connection,
educating peers as well as faculty is essential in helping
identify where those sources of problems may be. That may be
where many of the resources need to go, and we continue to
escalate.
Mrs. Davis of California. I guess these resources, is it
mostly in research or working within the institutions? Because
I think, Mr. Healy, you mentioned that you monitor other
institutions and what they are doing. I am interested in the
obstacles that they face. Is it a mindset issue or a resource
issue?
Ms. Walbert. I would argue----
Mrs. Davis of California. What is our role? How would you
like to relate to it in order to raise the consciousness,
whether it is the research or something else?
Ms. Walbert. Pulling together research is very valuable to
us, but not necessarily what we use on the ground day in and
day out. And understanding that the decisionmakers have to
think about the very real things that are happening in that
environment at that point in time, whether it is after an
earthquake or when a student comes in and says, I am worried
about the person that was sitting next to me in class, that
decisionmaking ladder has to be well-informed and clear and
understood, and I think sometimes it gets fueled by other
outside agencies, and we are trying really hard in being very
effective at identifying the most important elements.
Ms. Kennedy. I think what has changed as a result of our
continued investment in both public safety and in the crisis
management and threat prevention has been a coming together of
the different units of the university in ways that had not
happened before. I think when I first came into higher
education, the last thing I would have thought is I would be
meeting with a counselor, a public safety person, someone who
is an expert in crisis management and facilities and talking
about student issues and faculty issues and putting together
counseling following events. But that is very common now on
campuses. It certainly is very common within the CSU and within
California, and it is between public and private agencies,
between the police department and the local area, and when they
are called by our police.
Mrs. Davis of California. If I could interrupt, is it
correct to say that when it comes to a credible threat, that we
are using more tools at universities, and that personnel there
actually know what to do with that threat and to reach out in
some ways?
Ms. Kennedy. Increasingly they know what to do with it, and
they know how to reach out to the community because they have
been practicing this over and over again.
Mrs. Davis of California. Thank you.
Chairman Miller. Mr. Loebsack.
Mr. Loebsack. Thank you, Mr. Chair.
This has really been a pretty fascinating discussion. I
appreciate all the time that you folks have put into this and
the wonderful questions of my colleagues. I taught at a small
college for 23 years, Cornell College as opposed to Cornell
University. But also in my district is the University of Iowa
where in 1991 we had a mass shooting, and whenever something
like what happened at Virginia Tech happens, it really does
cause a lot of trauma in the area, certainly at the University
of Iowa in Iowa City, but at the smaller institutions such as
Cornell College in the area. I actually had a little bit of e-
mail contact with Cornell's college chaplain when the Virginia
Tech incident happened. So I am doing my best to try to stay in
touch with folks in the district about these issues.
I do want to also thank Dr. Walbert and Dr. Cornell for
your responses to my colleague Mr. Boustany's question about
sort of utilizing local campus resources and the extreme
caution. As a former academic myself and knowing clinical
psychologists who are also in academics, I am very aware of
that distinction that has to be maintained there as well.
But I have kind of a practical question, and maybe it is
more related to profiling than threat assessment, because I am
still sort of grasping what the difference is, not being an
expert in this area. I served on an admissions committee at
Cornell College a number of times for a number of years, and I
know a lot of institutions sort of have the same procedure that
Cornell has, and that is not everyone who applies goes before
that committee. A lot of people are automatically admitted if
they meet certain admissions criteria.
And there could be a number of people obviously who have
mental health problems, and I thank you very much for drawing
attention to that concern, or might be a threat of one sort or
another to themselves or to their colleagues, and so they are
not assessed in any way, shape or form. They may have had
problems in high school, but we don't know about that when they
get to the college level. They are admitted automatically, and,
unbeknownst to administrators or faculty, they have these
problems.
So my question would be is there any way that we could--
should we know that information before they are admitted to
college? And then if, for example, they come before a
committee, should a committee be aware of that information, and
to what extent should the committee take that into account? And
should there be a pipeline of sorts where the information about
someone's proclivity to violence in high school might follow
that person through a career?
I guess at least the two of you can answer that question,
maybe Mr. Healy as well.
Ms. Walbert. I will give it a shot. I think that there are
lots of anecdotal experiences that tell us that students,
individuals that have had trouble in the past can be very
successful citizens, and we have to walk that tightrope very,
very carefully. However, I think when we have information that
indicates that a student either would have difficulty in the
transition to the institution, the transitional issues are
significant, they have been in an environment where something
else has erupted, and it is similar, it is very worthy of those
contacts to try to ascertain whether or not there should be any
question about that participation level.
I would much rather have that conversation at a point in
time where as an educator I can help that student later on make
the most of those opportunities, and we can talk about all
sorts of mental health issues, and I can name any number of
people that are successful citizens that have worked through
that.
So I think that it is a slippery slope, and while we must
be careful for the community, we need to attend to the
individuals as well. And as educators we are in a great
position to be able to do that.
Mr. Loebsack. Thank you.
Dr. Cornell.
Mr. Cornell. There is not a checklist or a profile that we
can say, oh, don't admit these students because they would be
violent. We really aren't in a position to do that. Naturally,
any admissions committee, I assume, would be concerned if a
student has a criminal history or history of violent behavior
and would have to weigh that in making a decision.
But I think much more important is how do they function on
the campus. Do they show signs of disturbance, trouble, and can
we reach out to them soon enough to sort of deal with the
problem when it is at a lower level? I think our colleges need
more resources and more orientation toward that approach.
Mr. Loebsack. Right.
Did you want to say anything, Mr. Healy?
Mr. Healy. The only thing I would add is in trying to make
a determination on an individual who is coming in as a freshman
and their criminal background, most of those records would be
sealed, and we wouldn't have access to them anyway. So I agree
that this is obviously a touchy issue, a very slippery slope.
That doesn't mean we shouldn't be thinking about how we
evaluate our students before we allow them into our
institutions. Clearly we should learn some lessons from this
very tragic incident at Virginia Tech.
Mr. Loebsack. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Chairman Miller. I have six people remaining to ask
questions, and we are going to be out of here no later than 10
after. So the extent to which you can restrict yourself so your
colleagues can have a question.
Mr. Bishop.
Mr. Bishop of New York. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I will try
to be quick.
Dr. Walbert, I used to be a NASPA member, so I thank you
for your leadership.
Ms. Walbert. Excellent.
Mr. Bishop of New York. One of the things we focus on in
this committee is student cost, rapidly increasing rates of
tuition, and we have had testimony before this committee that
ties increase in student cost to a proliferation of nonteaching
staff on college campuses.
I note in your testimony that you talk about the key roles
the student affairs professionals play, how they facilitate
student learning, how they help maintain a healthy environment
on the campus. Could you talk about how colleges need to make
those kinds of judgments when they are constructing their
budgets and where they put their staffing resources? Could you
talk more about the role that student affairs professionals
play?
Ms. Walbert. It is essential to think about what the
expectations are of the students and the parents of the
students coming to a given institution and determine whether or
not the services, the programs, the activities are consistent
with those expectations. If you have a more mature population,
they may not expect campus environment activities and so forth.
The issue of counseling, however, is one of those things
where it is very important to define what it is that you are
going to provide. I could have dozens of psychiatrists on staff
and probably address many issues with students, but thinking
about the best utilization of the resources I have every year
every time I have resources at hand to think about is critical
for me as an administrator. I need to think about whether or
not I can utilize a full-time counselor more effectively than I
can utilize some other resource, and that stone doesn't get
upturned any given year. We deal with it constantly to make the
most of those resources.
Mr. Bishop of New York. I take it you would agree cutting
nonteaching staff is not the way to hold down tuition costs.
Ms. Walbert. I certainly wouldn't support that.
Mr. Bishop of New York. I will just ask one more question.
Dr. Cornell, you make several references to the Safe and
Drug-Free Schools. I am going to assume you are aware that the
President's budget recommended the total elimination of that
program for fiscal 2008. I take it that is a recommendation
that you would urge this Congress to overrule.
Mr. Cornell. I think it would be a disaster for our
schools.
Mr. Bishop of New York. Thank you very much.
I will yield back, Mr. Chairman.
Chairman Miller. Mr. Courtney.
Mr. Courtney. I have just a quick question also, which is
in terms of threat assessment, I mean contact with the court
system certainly would seem like a red flag for a current
student; again, I am not talking about precollege.
Maybe this question is for you, Mr. Healy, in terms of just
whether or not--particularly when you have got students who
don't live in the jurisdiction where the campus is, and if
there is trouble back home or a probate court finding like
there was with this shooter at Virginia Tech of some mental
issues, I mean, that does seem like a role that the Federal
Government--and we have the NCIC system for crime information
where there could be ways of making sure that actual
dispositions of conduct either that broke criminal laws or
resulted in some type of civil findings are transmitted to
people who need to assess threats, and whether or not that
system really works now, or whether or not that is something
that Congress should be looking at.
Mr. Healy. Sir, I think NCIC obviously works very well, but
the problem is that when you have students who are engaged in
activities around your campus, generally you will find out
through your relationships with your local agencies. If an
individual who is a student at your university is engaged or
involved in a situation in another State, it is a low
probability, because normally when students are getting in
trouble, they don't identify themselves as, I am a student of
Princeton University. So it is very rare we would find out
those situations.
So I think it is willing to discuss--it is good to have the
conversation about how we monitor that. Again, I think it is a
slippery slope. We understand that our students are citizens of
the world, and obviously they engage in activities sometimes
that aren't the best. That doesn't necessarily mean that they
shouldn't belong in the campus community.
Mr. Courtney. Again, I am not suggesting if someone gets in
trouble back home, that that somehow endangers their status,
but certainly it would seem like something the campus would
want to know about, again, some of the indicators that would
suggest someone is falling into trouble in terms of mental
health issues or behavior issues.
Ms. Walbert. If I could address that just a moment. It may
not be on a specific matter, but we meet with our local
judicial officers. We meet with the judge in our township. He
knows what our expectations are on our campus and how we
support the things that he does. So while we may not be talking
about an individual student, when he is dealing with an
individual, he knows how the institution expects it to be
addressed as well. I think that is a great collaboration with
off-campus resources as well.
Mr. Courtney. Thank you.
Chairman Miller. Mr. Payne.
Mr. Payne. Thank you very much.
In a somewhat different light I heard Dr. Kennedy mention
about the natural disaster that occurred. Fortunately, it was
when no students were at the school. I am a graduate of Seton
Hall University in New Jersey, and it is also in my
congressional district. Although it is on a little different
subject, as you know, there was the fire at Seton Hall where
several students died. The cause was certainly suspicious. It
was finally determined that it was started by several young
men.
And I am wondering whether in your overall assessment of
safety for children, for the students rather, have you and all
of you that are associated with schools--very quickly, had that
been addressed? I know we passed some Federal legislation and
all that, but what is--since we are talking about safety in
general, most of it is about the Virginia Tech, but how are you
all coping with that situation of the potential of fires and
fires being started and sometimes maybe even a mental
instability from a student?
Ms. Walbert. I would just say that any of the aspects of
behavior that students exhibit that is inappropriate or in
violation of a code of conduct is an opportunity for us to send
a loud message. On our campus any tinkering with any kind of
fire safety feature is a very severe violation of our code of
conduct, and students get that message loud and clear. We have
an opportunity to do that. There are other issues such as
alcohol and drugs as well. But fire safety is one of those
things that we can explain very clearly to students, and
utilizing the existing code of conduct is one mechanism to do
that.
Ms. Kennedy. I would just concur with Dr. Walbert on that.
I think that the CSU operates a similar system. We do say in
California that we have four seasons, fire, flood, earthquake
and summer. And so we are conscious of various kinds of acts of
natural disaster.
Mr. Healy. Again, I would just add that the approach that
IACLEA recommends for responding to catastrophes and critical
incidents is an all-hazards approach, so I think in every
emergency management plan you will see particular pieces that
address fire emergencies.
As you know, we are from the same State, and New Jersey has
very stringent requirements for colleges and universities.
Mr. Payne. Right. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Chairman Miller. Thank you.
Mr. Holt.
Mr. Holt. Thank you. I will be very brief because we have
little time, and also because I have been in and out of this
hearing, and I don't know what I have missed. You have probably
answered most of the questions. I just want to at this late
time in the hearing welcome Mr. Healy and say how proud
Princeton is of his work.
The one specific--by the way, how proud we are that we have
the president of the International Association of Campus Law
Enforcement. The one specific question I have that I believe
hasn't been answered, but you can correct me if it has, is just
how much, Mr. Healy, do you think we can learn from looking at
the work over the last half dozen years of secondary schools,
because you have recommended learning those lessons and
transferring them to the colleges and universities.
Mr. Healy. Sir, I believe that we can learn a lot from the
K-through-12 studies that have been conducted, and I think
primarily it is the behavioral threat assessment model. Again,
I think we need to take a deliberate look to ensure that the
model as currently written is completely transferable.
I am not so sure, and in my meetings with the FBI and the
Secret Service, they are obviously concerned that we just don't
take one model and just plop it over and expect that it will
operate the same way. But clearly the behavioral threat
assessment model is a good model that we need to consider
studying.
Mr. Holt. Thank you very much. I look forward to learning
more from Dr. Cornell. I was impressed with your different
view, I think, of what we need to do, and I thank the witnesses
very much.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Chairman Miller. Thank you.
Mr. Hare.
Mr. Hare. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I just have two questions--one for you, Dr. Cornell, and
one for Dr. Walbert.
Dr. Cornell, not all of the threats, as you know, are the
same, and you emphasize that school officials should not look
at them as such, and just a two-part question.
What are some of the elements used to assess the severity
of a threat, and how are the students' privacies protected
while you are doing this assessment?
Mr. Cornell. Okay. Those are both good questions.
We have a detailed decision tree in which we classify
threats as transient, serious substantive, or very serious
substantive. And there are a number of factors. You mostly have
to consider the context in which the threat is made, and we
have an interview protocol in which students are interviewed
about what did you say, what did you mean by that, how do you
think the other person took it? And then we have a similar
interview that we do for witnesses to the threat and for the
recipient of the threat.
So there is a process involved to sort of understand what
they meant by that, and then the more serious we think it is,
the more we involve law enforcement and mental health persons.
So there is a level at which every child then would get a
mental health assessment which would look at their history of
violence and their proclivity for violence, and then there
would be a law enforcement investigation in which we might
search the child's locker, the backpack, maybe get a search
warrant and go to the child's home. And as you know, there have
been many cases where a kind of threat assessment has been done
where they have gone into children's homes and have found
weapons in their bedrooms, for example. So there is a
progressive series of steps that we take.
Now, in terms of privacy, FERPA allows, in a health and
safety emergency, to share information, and that is very
important that they understand that FERPA, even as currently
written, allows in a health and safety emergency to share
information. And we include that in our training so that they
understand, in a case where it rises to a level of a very
serious, substantive threat, that information is not
confidential, and so we do not promise confidentiality when we
interview a student and we contact parents.
On the college domain, obviously, there are some additional
hurdles there to be dealt with--that is one of the adaptations
that you need to make--but that, I think, can be worked out.
Mr. Hare. Thank you.
Dr. Walbert, just one last question here.
You mentioned that the resident assistants are typically
trained to recognize and address interpersonal conflicts and
signs of mental health. What specific training are they given
to prepare them for dealing with troubled students, and would
you recommend that anything be added to that training, given
what we have seen?
Ms. Walbert. The training for resident assistants varies
from campus to campus, but in most cases it is quite extensive;
it is done over a series of times. Often, right before the
academic year begins, there is an intensive span of maybe 2
weeks of educational programs and so forth, and then there is
ongoing training, very typically.
The types of things that might be specific to this are
emergency protocols, understanding how to deal with certain
types of emergencies and so forth, but a great deal of time is
spent on helping the individual student think about how they
are going to interact with their peers, build the
relationships, form the team, the community that they live in
so that they will get the kinds of information when there is a
concern about a student.
The reality is that students are more apt to say something
to another student than they are to a senior administrator of
some sort, and we need to have the systems in place, which most
campuses do, to use that liaison very effectively.
So, in tooling them, we do things like, behind closed
doors, we practice; we role-play; we give them a number of
different kinds of experiences so that the students who are
working for us are very much a part of the community that the
other students are in.
Mr. Hale. I yield back.
Chairman Miller. Thank you.
Mr. Altmire.
Mr. Altmire. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Dr. Walbert, again, I wanted to actually follow-up on what
Mr. Hare was talking about.
What does a resident assistant do when they see or they
hear through another student--or, you know, a living companion
or whatever the case may be--that there may be an issue with a
student? What is the next step that takes place after that?
Ms. Walbert. There may be a number of decisions that that
individual has to make. They may consult with a professional
staff member; they may reach out to the student to find out
what is going on. Any number of times during the course of any
given week or month, I may leave a message for a resident
assistant and say, ``How is `so-and-so' doing?'' because I have
gotten something from a parent or from someone else who is
concerned about that individual. So we team together, and I do
not supervise the R.A.s directly. I am a vice president at the
same time. I might have that conversation with a professional
staff member who lives in a residence hall or with an
undergraduate student who serves as resident assistant.
There are different options. It could be personal/private
where you walk into a room and ask them how they are doing. It
could be escorting them right down to the counseling center
themselves, because the student trusts them.
Mr. Altmire. What is the level of interaction that the R.A.
would have once a decision is made at some point that there
really is, maybe, an above-average situation that is taking
place here, something out of the norm?
Ms. Walbert. It would vary depending on the specific
circumstances and where the trust levels existed with the
resident assistants and the professional staff at that point.
It might also vary given the time of day. We had a situation
that occurred at noon, and the resident assistant was off at
class, and it was all the professional staff who dealt with
that particular situation. And we later got back to the
resident assistant about what had transpired and what they
could do to help build the community on their floor.
Mr. Altmire. Thank you all for your time.
Lastly, given what happened at Virginia Tech recently, has
there been any thought to modifying the training that R.A.'s
receive based on that one case, or do you feel like we are
moving still in the right direction?
Ms. Walbert. I do not have the specifics of that particular
situation, the response at that moment in time, but I think all
of us are very well aware of the focus that those residential
students play in our system. They are so valuable to us. We
talk to them at the beginning of any given year, we interact
with them in a variety of ways, and we recognize them at the
end of each year. At the same time, every bit of training that
we can give them might make a difference in a critical moment.
Mr. Altmire. Thank you.
Chairman Miller. Thank you very much.
Thank you to the members and to the members of the panel
for your very thoughtful discussion this morning.
I know, on behalf of Mr. McKeon and myself, our goal in
this hearing is to see how we can be helpful, and I think that
many of your comments today were very, very constructive. The
one thing I might ask is, now that you have been through this
experience and you have made a number of recommendations, I
think also the question would be what it is we might do to make
campuses safe. I know some of you have worked through Homeland
Security; you have worked through the Justice Department; you
have worked through the Department of Education.
How is it that we might make that process a little bit
simpler for access to those resources and whether or not they
are there in a fashion to be--I mean, you have painted a pretty
comprehensive picture here of the kinds of resources that you
have to assemble on a campus to really deal with this problem,
whether it is an earthquake or it is a shooter incident or
everything in between, and sometimes we do not necessarily
align resources with that comprehensive responsibility that
campuses have, even of K through 12.
We obviously look forward to Governor Kaine's report from
the commission there, and we will be pulling this together to
see how it is that we might be helpful. But if you have some
suggestions along those lines, I think that would be helpful,
because you work with these programs from the other end. We
know they are a great idea when they leave this committee. Now,
sometimes they get screwed up out there. So that would be
helpful if you could call upon that experience and relay that
to the committee. I would appreciate it. Thank you very much.
With that, the committee stands adjourned.
[Whereupon, at 12:10 p.m., the committee was adjourned.]