SUNY Oswego’s Campus Safety Advisory Committee released the SUNY Oswego Emergency Preparedness Training on Feb. 1 to all students, faculty and staff via Brightspace.
The training provides information about the Standard Response Protocol (SRP), a program used in schools across New York to ensure students and staff know how to respond to and stay safe during varying emergencies. The university adopted the Higher Education (HED) version of the program.
“It covers a range of natural and human-caused disasters from fires and weather emergencies to active shooters and hazmat and provides guidance about what specific actions should be taken in each,” Dr. Jaclyn Schildkraut, Executive Director of the Regional Gun Violence Research Consortium at the Rockefeller Institute of Government and associate professor of criminal justice at SUNY Oswego, said in an email.
Schildkraut is a certified trainer of SRP for K-12 schools and said she has been advocating for on-campus programs for many years.
“After hearing concerns of students and staff following the mass shootings in Buffalo and Uvalde, the Campus Safety Advisory Committee was a driving force in bringing the training to campus,” Schildkraut said.
The training is available online and has seven modules: an introduction, one module for each type of protocol in SRP-HED and a conclusion with a short quiz. Schildkraut, who designed the training, said it should only take individuals about 20 minutes to complete. The SRP-HED program recognizes and educates about five different emergency responses: secure, lockdown, evacuate, shelter and hold.
“I am certainly hopeful that students, as well as staff, will complete the training, particularly in light of the requests we had for it in the first place,” Schildkraut said in an email. “We are already seeing a good number of people going through in the first week.”
Christy Huynh, SUNY Oswego’s assistant vice president for student affairs and member of the campus safety advisory committee, said one reason they chose to adopt SRP-HED is because it is broadly used within New York State.
“It allows us to have a common language,” Huynh said. “Majority of our students are from New York State and are familiar with this because it’s similar to what they learned in K-12.”
The training is not mandatory, but all who have access to it are highly encouraged to complete it. Huynh said the committee was working with departments on campus to increase participation.
“Because it’s not mandatory, what we have come up with is an implementation plan to really roll it out broadly,” Huynh said. “For instance, we have a group of student leaders that work in our office, so maybe we would imbed that into their training. If departments and other [organizations] do that across the board that’ll be a good way to reinforce it and encourage people to do it.”
Huynh also said that the training, despite being in Brightspace and having a graded quiz, will not impact student’s grades or GPA.
So far, Huynh said she has gotten positive feedback from faculty and staff about the training. Those who have completed the course seem to be “grateful for the information and the clarity of it.”
The training will be renewed annually, so students and faculty can and are encouraged, to complete it every year. It will continue to be shown in Brightspace.
“It is always better to have tools, like emergency preparedness training and not need it than to need it and not have it,” Schildkraut said in an email. “Best case is that everyone has skills to help keep them safe regardless of location, on or off campus, but that they never need to use it. Worst case is needing to use these skills but not having them.”
Alongside the online training, Huynh said they also hope to sponsor in-person sessions during the semester, but will only be available per request. For more information about scheduling an in-person training or about the online modules, contact Huynh at deanofstudents@oswego.edu.
Photo by: Brandon Chaug
