The Office of Communication and Marketing unveiled a webpage dedicated to informing students of campus safety after the Oswego State Student Association passed a resolution last semester to inform students of sexual assault on campus Tuesday. 

“The administration really listened to students’ concerns, investigated and evaluated our options and actually delivered something that we feel responds directly to students,” said Wayne Westervelt, Oswego State’s chief communications officer. “We understood that the students really desired to be notified.”

The webpage is titled “Commitment to safety” which can be found at the footer of the oswego.edu homepage under “Campus.” It allows students and faculty to access resources and information about campus safety and incidents.

“The creation of the new campus bulletin resulted from listening to our students,” Oswego State President Deborah Stanley said in a statement. “Their input was the basis for our efforts to create a web presence dedicated to enhancing communications and incorporating a broader perspective of our campus’ shared commitment to safety.”

The webpage also includes links to the Annual Security & Safety Report, the Daily Incident Report, formerly known as the Police Blotter, and the most recent addition, a “Campus bulletin” site, which is located on the footer of “News and Events” under “more information,” that hosts NY-alerts, messages from the Oswego State president and campus notifications that would directly impact the campus.

“I think the campus community was very focused on sexual assault reporting but it would be short-sighted if we didn’t look at communications overall, holistically, as far as our students, faculty and staff,” Westervelt said. 

Over winter break, Westervelt researched how other colleges communicated these incidents, including Cornell University, Rochester Institute of Technology, Ithaca College, Marist College and other SUNY schools.

“I looked across the board,” Westervelt said. “I noticed that some had campus safety related pages, some had most of their alerts and communications on a university police page and some had it on a safety page. But what I noticed was a lot of the communication was solely crime-report based. They didn’t look at things, overall. We wanted to go beyond that.”

Westervelt presented this information in front of a wide collection of students, faculty and staff to find a solution to how Oswego State can offer transparency to the campus community.

“We wanted to find a middle ground of a way students could be notified if they wanted to be but not where the whole campus was being blasted with something and without their choice of whether or not they wanted to see it,” said SA President Emily Nassir, who was one of the students represented in the process of making this new communication platform.

The Office of Communications and Marketing built a landing page that “talks about being committed to safety on our campus and committed to providing resources to students,” Westervelt said.

According to Westervelt, one of the first changes they made to improve communication was to rename, what was formally known as the Police Blotter.

“We truly believe that the reference to and the way University Police had ‘Police Blotter’ on their webpage was misleading,” Westervelt said. “We wanted to remove that perception. I think in general when people think ‘police blotter’ they think that a crime occurred. Whereas a ‘daily incident report’ is a more accurate reflection on what reports University Police receives on a daily basis. They are legally required to post all reports, more than just sexual assaults.”

The content of this report has not changed and is still listed on University Police’s webpage. It is updated every day to not only list the date, time, location and type of incident but the current status of the report and whether it is closed by investigation or if it is pending investigation.

According to Westervelt, the webpage “puts the control of communication in the hands of students, faculty and staff.” It is used as a record and to stop the spread of rumors and limit the amount of emails students receive.

With the past communication process being restricted to email, students become desensitized to a campus-wide email, Nassir said.

“If you ask most student they would say, ‘Oh, I just delete it because I assume it is CTS,’” Nassir said. “There is this issue that we are sending out to much to begin with so we were dealing with the issue of some students wanting to be informed and some who don’t.”

For future use, the Office of Communication and Marketing plans to add descriptions and summaries to the webpages to create more of an understanding of the pages’ use.

“We are trying to enhance our communications, but our job is not done,” Westervelt said. “We still have things to do.”

As of now, students like freshman Kerri McGovern think the webpage is effective.

“I think it is a good idea to do so that if there is a victim, they wouldn’t be reminded every time a notification is sent out,” McGovern said.

Junior Max Ross agreed and said although he would not want anyone to be negatively effected by it, he thinks it would make people more aware and feel more safe on campus.

“I think it is cool that you have a webpage you can bookmark on your phone or something and see what goes on as people are walking around campus at all hours of the day,” Ross said.

Nassir hopes that the future of this webpage will have a positive impact on students.

“I hope people will take advantage of it,” Nassir said. “I hope the impact that it has is that it allows students to be more involved and learning what is going on and for the ones who don’t want to learn, it gives them some sense of relief that it is not in their face.”