By LINDSEY SCHIBELHUT, Staff Reporter.
With school shootings so often in the news, many students at Delta may wonder what plans are in place in case such a situation arises. Delta has policies to make sure students receive up to date information in the event of an intruder or any other emergencies.
According to the Delta College Department of Public Safety (DCDPS) section on hostile intruders, it is advised that when students feel in danger they can reach Delta’s Public Safety office by dialing 9111 on classroom phones or call 911 on personal phones. Classroom telephones also connect to the Public Safety Department by locating the “Police” button. The faculty is to move students into a secure room as quickly as possible, keeping everyone away from windows and doors. When possible cover all windows and keep classrooms locked-down until Public Safety or other law enforcement can arrive. If you find yourself out in the open and unable to be in a secure room, you may choose to play dead if other victims are around you.
Director of Public Safety at Delta Steve Witzke said, “In Public Safety we train. We’ve had times where we’ve brought in state police, local police, sheriffs department and the Saginaw Valley Police Department. We have a good working relationship with them. These are all agencies, which could respond to the Delta main campus in the event of an emergency. We try to train together so they understand where we are coming from, so we all have the same mindset going forward in one of these situations to take out the bad guy and mitigate as little personal injuries as possible.”
Witzke goes annually to each division chair of Delta College in order to discuss with them the steps instructors should take when it comes to safety procedures, while informing them on what the Public Safety office is doing as well.
“We rely on the faculty to help inform students on what to do in the event of an emergency situation,” says Witzke, “In an emergency situation we need them to be the shepherds and take charge to share with everyone where they need to be at certain times.”
If students have not signed up yet, Delta has a free safety text service available. It is provided by the Nixle Company and comes through Delta’s Department of Public Safety office. You can sign up for the service one of two ways. First, you can send a text message reading:
DELTAEMG from your mobile phone to the number: 888777.
Secondly, you can use the form at the bottom of the http://www.delta.edu/publicsafety/emergencynotification.aspx page. By signing up students are notified about the latest emergency-related alerts such as: fire, bad weather, intruders, campus closures, etc.
Witzke says, “We rely on the people to be our eyes and ears. If you see something that suspicious and makes you cringe, something about it doesn’t look right; report it. I would rather respond to something that’s nothing, and give a polite ‘I’m sorry, but it’s for your benefit we are doing these checks’, then find out maybe you had seen something and someone else had seen something on the same suspicious person, but didn’t report it because you didn’t want to be the person that made somebody uncomfortable, then find out it was was the bad guy.
He continued, “You’d feel bad and we’d feel bad that we couldn’t stop a situation early on.”
To learn more about Delta’s safety and emergency policies students are advised to visit www.delta.edu/publicsafety/emergency.aspx so they can review and be informed on a variety of different emergency procedures including: reporting emergencies, bomb threats, chemical/radiation spills, evacuation procedures, fire, hostile intruders, medical emergencies and tornadoes or adverse weather, among others.
