Following recent active shooter situations on university campuses in Mississippi, colleges in the Golden Triangle are looking at ways to ramp up campus security.
Administrators at East Mississippi Community College in Mayhew plan to implement an active drill simulating what would happen if a shooter were to threaten the campus, according to Paul Miller, the school’s executive vice president.
Miller said the college will wait a few weeks to plan the drill, in order to put time between the drill and a Sept. 14 shooting at Delta State University that claimed the life of a professor.
“We want to make sure we go about it in the right way so … when we do the scenario, it’s not misunderstood as being a real event,” Paul said. “Probably a little bit of time needs to separate us from these actual events.”
The DSU campus went on lockdown and law enforcement officers conducted a building-by-building search, evacuating students and faculty as they went. Classes for the rest of the day and Tuesday were canceled. The culprit in the shooting — Shannon Lamb, a DSU professor — later killed himself.
The shooting occurred barely two weeks after Mississippi State University locked down its campus when the university and issued an active shooter alert. There ultimately was no shooter and the incident ended with no injuries.
Updating approaches
Nora Miller, senior vice president and chief financial officer at Mississippi University for Women, said both DSU and MSU did an excellent job of getting information out to people as quickly as they could based on the information they had at the time.
After learning MSU was on lockdown, Nora walked onto MUW’s campus and saw construction workers at a nearby building. That made her realize that MUW needed a way of alerting contractors on campus in the event of an active shooter on campus. At the university’s next tabletop drill — a meeting in which administrators talk through what to do during emergencies on campus — they determined ways to get in touch with project managers to help keep workers and others contractors on the College Street campus safe.
Both MUW and EMCC go through tabletop drills and active drills to keep administrators up to date on security and to keep thinking through what to do for different situations.
MUW holds a multi-agency active drill once a year. The university holds tabletop drills twice a year. After the shooting at Delta State, Nora thinks it’s time to start holding tabletop drills more often.
Real time update systems
Both MUW and EMCC have ways of alerting students and faculty the minute an emergency happens. MUW officials have been pushing the SchoolDude Crisis Manager app. Anyone can download the app for free, and it will give them information about what to do in different emergency situations on campus.
At last count, about 150 people at MUW had the app, but the administration is working on ways to encourage more students to download it.
The university has plenty of ways to alert students in the event of an emergency. The buildings on campus all contain television sets that give students information about what’s going on on campus, and the administration can take over those to issue alerts whenever necessary. The administration can also send mass emails, texts and messages on social media to let students notice when they may be in danger.
“We figure if you try three or four ways to get a message to somebody, hopefully one of them will reach them when they need it,” Nora Miller said.
EMCC also has alerts that go to students’ phones and emails, but because the Mayhew campus doesn’t have residence halls, the campus’ main security is its own police force, Paul said. The officers have the same training as city police officers and county sheriff’s deputies. The Mayhew campus also supplements the force with contractual security.
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