Brittany Ballantyne
Social Media Director
Kattey Ortiz
Equinox Staff
After students voiced their disapproval about the lack of communication from Campus Safety during the on-campus gunman incident Nov. 17, 2012, the department explained the reasoning behind the measures taken.
“That’s our first concern with anything, are our students safe? Is the faculty and staff safe? Anybody that’s part of this community, our first concern is that,” Associate Director of Campus Safety Ethan Kipnes said.
“In that moment,” Kipnes said, “We felt that CityWatch was adequate to provide that notification.” However, not all students are signed up for the notification system, which is why some students questioned that there was nothing to alert them on the Keene State College website.
Sophomore Nick Garrity was on his way back to his room when he overheard a cop saying the campus was on lockdown. Garrity then said three resident assistants called him to tell him what was happening.
Garrity is not signed up for CityWatch. However, he explained that although his roommate is signed up, his roommate was not notified for at least another hour after RAs approached Garrity. That’s when Garrity took to Twitter and Facebook to spread the word.
“I was completely shocked because I think I had nine or ten people come up to me and tell me ‘I would have not known anything if it wasn’t for your Facebook status’,” Garrity said. “I think that’s a flawed system because people should have been notified immediately.”
Senior Resident Assistant Rachel Marra felt differently and said, “I think it’s good they kind of waited to send out an e-mail until they knew for sure it was a threat.”
Marra gave Campus Safety the benefit of the doubt and suggested perhaps they didn’t have someone at the computer because all hands were on deck.
“Campus Safety has no control over the [Keene State College] website,” Kipnes said. “That would be a different component of our notification process, so to speak. So if that determination was made, it would have come from the Marketing and Communications Department which ultimately has control over the website.”
Kipnes also explained the system Campus Safety has doesn’t have the capability to send an alert to the website automatically. As part of the Campus Safety protocol, they communicate with the Marketing and Communications Department and that department makes a determination, he said. Kipnes said he spoke directly with the Marketing and Communications Director, Kathleen Williams around 4:30 a.m. the morning of the incident. He said he is not sure of what her protocol entails.
Alexandra Manigault, a sophomore, was signed up for CityWatch and received no notifications. Manigualt expressed an interested in seeing Campus Safety partner with Marketing and Communications in cases where emergency notifications need to go on the website.
Kipnes said that Campus Safety uses CityWatch as their primary notification method in an emergency situation, which is why they encourage everybody to sign up for the program. He stressed it is something that is heavily dependent on how the student signs up for notifications.
“The system is setup so that when you sign up for it, you can choose the different media that you would like to get messages through,” he said. “Sometimes, students will only sign up with a phone number which means that they’ll only receive the phone call.”
Junior Chris Kidger said he has never signed up for CityWatch and did not find out about the incident until the following Tuesday.
“I should probably figure out how to get notified. That’s probably my responsibility to do that,” he said. Kidger did say he thought it would be a good idea for the college to have every student’s cell phone number and notify them automatically, whether they’re signed up for CityWatch or not, in the case of an emergency.
“They [the school] need to find a more efficient way of making sure everyone’s informed,” he said.
While Campus Safety’s use of CityWatch is to inform current students of urgent notifications to protect them, those included in the message system were also former KSC students who had either graduated or transferred to other schools.
“So in this emergency situation, where you can imagine we’re very busy, we’re also dealing with dozens and dozens of phone calls from people saying ‘why did I get this phone call?’” Kipnes said.
He explained that he responded to many people who had not listened to the voicemail before calling to see what the message was about, which thus took more time to explain to people what the message was that he sent out in the first place.
By responding to these calls as well as Keene Police Department calls, Kipnes pointed out that he had many responsibilities to take on at once. He stressed that when Campus Safety puts out those notifications, they are serious in what they ask the students to do, which in this case was to stay inside. While trying to fulfill these duties Kipnes encountered a number of students who were aware of the emergency messages but still chose to walk from dorm to dorm. He said, “We need everybody, for their own safety, to follow those messages.” This added to his task load and caused complications to his efforts to maintain the student body’s safety.
“We had plans in place to try to overcome that. We had Resident Life staff that were in the buildings trying to staff those areas and keep people from leaving,” he said.
Garrity said he felt resident assistants did a good job informing their residents about what was happening. He noted that many RAs were making sure their residents were safe and inside their residence halls.
“That was comforting, even though there wasn’t any other notification from Campus Safety or KPD for another few hours,” Garrity said. He also observed that students were texting one another, trying to find out their roommates’ whereabouts and a few residents had plans to try and do what they called “escort missions” to find their friends and return with them safely to the dorm.
“That showed that a lot of people were working together to ensure the safety of others,” Garrity said, but Kipnes stressed that anyone leaving secured buildings put themselves in danger.
Kipnes described the early morning as a ripple effect with more and more calls demanding information. He said yet another thing he dealt with was various sports teams and groups who called to ask about the status of the lockdown since their practices and meetings began early in the morning.
Luckily, Kipnes said, Campus Safety was able to lift the lockdown.
“I think overall we feel pretty good about the situation and there’s always going to be questions you can ask, but we worked very well with the Keene Police Department. Our communication between our agencies was very good. We were up to speed on everything that was going on and kept in the loop very well in that sense,” Kipnes said.
Garrity summarized the handling of the incident and said, “I think that everyone, Campus Safety, the police department, the college in general, did do a good enough job that they kept all of the people on campus safe and it could have been a lot worse so I’m thankful for that.”
Kipnes addressed that after an incident similar to this, there will evidently be judgement calls. He said Campus Safety as a whole tries its best to communicate as quickly as possible with as many people as possible, “but we can always look back and we can say, I remembered to call these 18 people and forgot this nineteenth person that I probably should have called at some point during this incident that needed to know.”
He then said, “one of the things that’s often times easy to forget is that as these things play on, we’re dealing with the incident in the moment but there’s a lot of things that it affects.” Kipnes said the department is always looking for ways to improve their communication system and re-evaluating which programs work best for the majority of people.
Although CityWatch is their predominant approach to spread word of emergency situations, Kipnes said Campus Safety is constantly reviewing their system and will continue to do so.
Brittany Ballantyne can be contacted at
bballantyne@keene-equinox.com
Kattey Ortiz can be contacted at
kortiz@ksc.keene.edu