More campuses hold lockdown drills
At 10 a.m. on Dec. 3, students’ cellphones at South Carolina State University buzzed with this text message:
“Initiation of Lockdown: The following alert is an active shooter mock drill being conducted by SC State Police. This is only a drill.”
Interim Police Chief Mernard Clarkson wanted to test the university’s mass notification system and response to an active shooter situation.
“Any time you can train on something and have pre-information on what to do, the better the outcome will be,” Clarkson said.
Clarkson had no idea that less than two months after the drill, the university would send a similar text message for real. On Jan. 24, a fellow student killed Brandon Robinson, 20, sending the campus of 3,200 students into lockdown.
A growing number of other universities also are staging active shooter drills.
On April 16, 2007, 33 people — including the shooter — were killed at Virginia Tech, spurring a national conversation about campus security.
“I can say since 2008, active shooter drills have become more common,” said Alison Kiss, executive director of the Clery Center for Security on Campus at Lehigh University.
This year, at least five shootings have taken place on college campuses: Jan. 20 at Widener University in Chester, Pa.; Jan. 21 at Purdue in West Lafayette, Ind.; Jan. 24 at South Carolina State in Orangeburg; Jan. 28 at Tennessee State in Nashville; and Jan. 30 at Eastern Florida State College in Palm Bay.
“This active shooter problem has been on everybody’s mind and things haven’t gotten any better,” said David Tedjeske, public safety director at Villanova University. “We wanted to orient the entire university community to the idea of a lockdown.”
One day in November, Villanova’s 10,000-member student body and staff were instructed not to leave buildings. Classes continued in lecture halls.
In addition to giving safety personnel practice at quickly securing the buildings and providing a test for the university’s alert system, the drill gave students and staff something to think about, Tedjeske said.
This year, all five Maysville Community and Technical College campuses in Kentucky are having the drills, said Bruce Florence, Licking Valley Campus branch campus director.