In the case of an active shooter or other campus emergency, Emporia State has policies in place to protect students, but those policies don’t include a lockdown.
School officials say that while they try to provide a secure campus, safety is ultimately your responsibility.
“You’re a hundred percent responsible for you – one hundred percent – and in our society, we tend to shift that responsibility to others because if I get hurt, the ambulance is coming,” said Chris Hoover, director of Police and Safety. “If I’m threatened, cops are coming. You know, if it really gets ugly, the National Guard is coming. If I’m on fire or my building’s on fire, the fire department is coming.”
The shooting of Ethan Schmidt, ESU alumnus, at Delta State University last moth, may have others thinking about safety on campus. Schmidt was shot by a colleague in his office at the Mississippi University. He graduated with two bachelor’s degrees and one master’s degree from ESU.
Carrie Boettcher, public service executive for University Facilities, said she cannot recall a time when campus has ever had a lockdown.
“It really isn’t applicable to higher education in most cases because you can’t really lock down such an open environment,” Hoover said.
Even in that kind of scenario, she said, university officials would probably not use the word “lockdown.”
“We would probably say, ‘Stay indoors’ or ‘Avoid the area,’ so we’re not putting people in jeopardy trying to figure out what to do,” Boettcher said.
The reason that campus cannot have a lockdown, so to speak, is because ESU does not have the ability to instantaneously lockdown every building and door in such an environment.
“We don’t have an automatic door locking system where you can just push a button from another building and all the doors are locked,” said Lynn Hobson, dean of students.
The residential halls are one location that could actually be locked down because they require a swipe card access. A campus-wide lockdown, however, is not plausible, Hoover said.
“I think that it would be beneficial to have a campus-wide lockdown policy, but at the same time, I can see how it would be really hard to institute,” said Amber Seymour, junior nursing major.
The life of a faculty or staff member will not be jeopardized by the university in order to lock all buildings on campus if a situation is happening, Hoover said.
“It goes back to (the question of), are we going to have building services standing there bent over with an allen wrench trying to lock a door when there’s somebody running around shooting?” Hoover said. “The answer to that question is no, we’re not going to put somebody in that jeopardy. The university wouldn’t do that to one of its employees.”
Another reason that ESU does not have a lockdown procedure is because information in an emergency situation can get “very old, very fast,” Hoover said, especially in the event of an emergency situation like an active shooter.
“What we don’t want to do is lock a building down and say ‘lockdown’ and lock a door and trap someone in a building with somebody that is actively shooting,” Boettcher said.
If a lockdown policy or procedure were in place, it would be expected to be followed, and Hoover said that emergency situations can be fluid and change frequently.
“You can’t give a set of directions that are going to apply to every single person involved in the situation,” Hobson said.
In 2015, two college campuses have undergone “lockdowns” on their campuses. In May, Johnson County Community College underwent a lockdown after a report of a woman with a gun on campus. The lockdown consisted of asking those on campus to “stay in place while they did an extensive search of the 250-acre campus,” according to KMBC News. In September, Kansas State University was put on lockdown for four hours after a possible gunman was spotted on campus.
Hoover said that other universities have taken similar stances as ESU in terms of lockdown procedures.
However, K-State adopted a new policy last spring that includes “lockdown” in its name. The ALICE program stands for “alert, lockdown, inform, counter and evacuate.” Steve Broccolo, who is the emergency management coordinator at K-State, did say that many rooms on their can’t actually be locked down, according to K-State’s student newspaper.
“(K-State’s emergency notification system) notifies you when a dangerous condition exists on campus, such as storms or winter weather, an active shooter or for a forced campus closure like the lockdown of the Manhattan campus this morning,” a September press release from K-State’s Office of Student Life said.
In the event of an emergency – whether it be environmental, weather, violence or another circumstance – ESU will alert students, faculty and staff immediately and in the same way, regardless of what’s going on. This may include an email, an emergency alert through RAVE, a message on the campus computers and an emergency banner placed on ESU’s home webpage.The university is also working on other venues to alert individuals of emergency situations, which will be able soon.
“We would try to give specific language that gives the individual the ability to make the decision of what they need to do in that situation,” Boettcher said.
ESU teaches the method of “run, hide, fight” to its students, faculty and staff. “Run, hide, fight” is a process created in Houston, Texas, and supported by Homeland Security and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
“We can’t stop these kinds of things from happening because of the open environment and society we live in, but I think we can certainly minimize a lot of the horrible outcomes that have occurred at other events,” Hoover said.
Boettcher said if you can run, try that first. If you need to hide until you can run, lock a door and secure yourself somewhere safe. As a last resort, it may be necessary to fight with whatever weapon is available.
The university will be holding two “Run, Hide, Fight” workshops in the upcoming weeks. The first is at 2 p.m. Oct. 14 in the Preston Family Room in the Memorial Union. The other will be at 3 p.m. Oct. 22 in Science Hall, room 72.
