The Emporia Gazette

May 27, 2012

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Marc Childress had one thing to be grateful for Monday. His friends and students had made it through the day alive.

When those friends and students attend Virginia Tech, that’s no small thing.

At least 30 people were killed Monday at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg, shot by a gunman who then turned the gun on himself. It was the worst school shooting the nation has ever seen.

And for Childress, it happened at a place he once called home. The Emporia State University professor got his doctorate from Virginia Tech about 15 years ago. He remembers it as a quiet, beautiful campus. He still knows some of the faculty there, along with three graduate students. So when Childress heard the news while attending a conference in Las Vegas, he first hit the Internet to check the stories and then hit the phone.

“I’ve been in touch with two of the students and I know the other one’s OK,” he said in a call from Nevada on Monday afternoon. “I have a lot of friends who teach there, but they weren’t in those buildings. They pretty much shut down — kept everyone in their offices and wouldn’t let them out until the coast was clear.”

The shootings happened in a dorm and an academic building on the opposite sides of campus. And the ease with which it happened has shaken a lot of people, Childress among them.

“It makes you think that things like this can happen even at Emporia State,” he said.

Lockdown?

He’s not the first person that that’s occurred to.

“Security’s a main issue — and it’s becoming the biggest issue,” said Mark Runge, ESU’s director of university facilities. “As much as we like to think we’re buffered or secured from that type of a possibility, I guess no one in this day and age can be 100 percent sure.”

Security isn’t an easy thing for any public university. Unlike a high school or middle school, it’s not a case of sealing off one building. A university such as ESU has numerous buildings with many doors. And from 6:30 in the morning until about 10 at night, most of those doors are open to the public.

It’s not even that hard to get into a dormitory. From 11 p.m. to 7 a.m., the dorms are locked up tight. But the buildings are unlocked during the daytime. Officially, a visitor is supposed to be accompanied by the person they’re coming to see, but right now that’s nearly impossible to enforce, said Craig Reinehr, director of residential life.

“Could they get into the building? Yes they could,” Reinehr said.

One possibility could be to make more use of card readers and magnetic locks. When a door is magnetically locked, even a key won’t work — a swipe card has to be inserted to open up and get in. People leaving the building can open the door normally.

Right now, the Morse Hall complex has four card readers while Twin Towers has three. That’s practical for nighttime use, when most of the doors don’t need to be used anyway. But if the doors started to be locked in the daytime, that could be another story.

Adding enough card readers to cover all the doors needed could cost $10,000 to $20,000, Reinehr said, stressing that that was a very rough estimate. The issue isn’t the cost of the readers themselves, but the additional connections and panels needed to bring them into the system.

“To do it the right way costs a lot of money,” he said.

And it still leaves two problems. First, it’s a little inconvenient for students to have to constantly unlock the doors as they visit the dorms throughout the day. And second, if a would-be killer is a student — as seems to be the case in Virginia — the killer would be able to unlock the doors.

“Even with the best of security systems, if they’ve got a pass, they can get in,” Runge said.

Heads up

For most places on campus, a lockdown simply isn’t practical. On any university, people circulate constantly between classrooms, the library, the administration building and more.

“Creating a ‘compound’ effect is nothing that anyone would like to do,” Runge said. “It’s not conducive to education or the collegiate experience. But neither is someone coming in with a gun.”

“I think it’s something where all campuses will sit down and ask ‘What can we do?’” Reinehr said. “It’s a matter of balancing convenience with safety.”

One thing that can help, regardless of the security system, is for students to remain alert. Even in the open-access dorms, Reinehr said, a lot of problems have been headed off by residents who paid attention.

“We’ve had high-school kids that ran in and were vandalizing things,” he said. “That got stopped in a hurry because the residents are responsible for their area. They said ‘Hey, this is happening,’ and we shut it down pretty quickly.”

For Runge, prevention is just as important as protection. One advantage of a small campus, he said, is that students and faculty are more likely to know each other. That means there’s a greater chance that someone will notice a student is having problems and get them to find help before it becomes a tragedy.

“I can’t stress enough — counseling is available for people on campus,” Runge said. “If you have a problem, services are available.”