Correction, Feb. 11: It was not confirmed that Dash Porter was on campus.
Every semester, there seems to be an on-campus issue that causes concern for students, staff and faculty.
From James Lemus’ alleged threats to “create a massacre” on campus in fall 2014, the officer-involved shooting in spring 2015 and the most-recent alleged threats from Dash Porter to kill his former professor, Cynthia Somin; students have not received enough information or been alerted quickly enough to events like these.
We believe the Nixle alert system that the campus uses is a weak and inefficient source of information for students, and there needs to be a better way for students to be informed in a more timely manner.
During the aforementioned incidents, most of the alerts sent out by the system were late, and because situations like these are ‘active’ it creates a delay between when something happens, and when students actually hear about it.
Fifteen days passed before the campus was notified of James Lemus’ alleged threats, while three hours went by before anyone was notified of the officer-involved shooting on campus.
Many students and faculty were not even aware that on Feb. 2, Dash Porter was supposed to be on campus for his hearing regarding his future with the college, let alone that the restraining order filed against him was denied in court two weeks prior.
A look into a student’s school email can confirm that nothing has been sent to them about Porter at all, and yet, he’s on campus for a hearing and not a single student was informed. (It was not confirmed that Porter was on campus).
There are a couple of problems with our point of replacing Nixle, and we understand that first of all, there would need to be an entire change form the system and that would be a problem for the school.
Second of all, in the situation of the officer-involved shooting, there is no need to cause a mass panic concerning a shooter on campus when the police handled it within five minutes.
As a news organization, it’s our job to get information out to students as quickly as possible, we would love to work with the school to create a more viable way for everyone to know what’s going on.
We can create an app, or a new system altogether, whatever it ends up being we just need to make sure that the campus community is in the loop whenever something dangerous happens at school.
