It’s often easy to think of large-scale, headline grabbing disasters and emergencies when discussing emergency preparedness. Yet, as participants at the EDUCAUSE Summit on “The Role of Information Technology in Campus Security and Emergency Management,” sit down with one another, it becomes clear that hazards can be found across the spectrum. When prompted to discuss “challenges” to emergency response and preparedness on their campus, participants, inevitably, use examples from their own experiences. Students hear about a threat and fail to report it to the correct authorities. A tragedy occurs and other students, ignoring the danger, participate in the same risky behavior. Or community members react in counterproductive ways to alert systems. It’s clear that the risk cuts across campuses regardless of size, location or classification.
With that in mind, the group devised a list of common challenges for creating safe campuses and well-executed emergency response plans. They focused on those local challenges at their institutions and then larger, more national issues.
