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School Security
Staying Safe on Campus
By Sue Marquette Poremba
On our campus visit to Temple University, we sat in a small room with 20 other parents and potential students. The admissions counselor came into the room, introduced herself and her assistants and made a few welcoming remarks before saying, "Temple has the sixth largest police force in the state. Campus is lit with stadium lighting, and you can literally walk across campus at night and have enough light to read a book. This is a very safe campus."
You could hear the audible sighs of relief from the parents. Temple is an inner-city school, and student safety is a high priority for parents and the administration.
"Crimes on campus tend to reflect the crimes of the surrounding community," says John Myers, director of campus security and safety at Wartburg College. For example, he says, "A community with drug and car theft problems can expect the local school to have similar experiences."
However, crime happens on all colleges, no matter the school's size or location, and parents need to be aware of what happens on and around the campus.
"When my son and husband visited one particular campus, they stopped for pizza," says Kate Dudding of Clifton Park, N.Y. "The pizza guy made some crack about the neighborhood around the college." The comment had Dudding and her family searching for campus crime statistics on the college's Web site.
All colleges and universities are required by federal law to release campus crime statistics. According to Myers, the Jeanne Clery Disclosure of Campus Security and Campus Crime Statistics Act requires the reporting of specific campus crimes (criminal, homicide, sex offenses, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, motor vehicle theft, arson, hate crimes and the number of arrests and referrals for liquor violations, drug violations and weapons violations) by calendar year, to be published and distributed to the campus community by October 1 of the following year. This information is usually found on individual college Web sites. Some schools send crime statistics as part of the information packets to prospective students.
The statistics can provide the starting point of discussions about campus safety between parents and students. While Dudding says that safety was equally important for her and her son, Gary Delafield of State College, Pa., has a different point of view. "[Campus safety] is more important to me [than to my child], as I am a lot more aware of all that can go wrong, whereas my child has blind faith that most of the time things go OK," he says.
