One of the most important challenges a university faces is ensuring the safety of its students, faculty, and staff—and key to this is the school’s ability to manage crime and campus safety. To ensure that American institutions of higher learning are responding appropriately to issues of crime and campus safety, the US government passed the Jeanne Clery Act, which requires most colleges and universities to disclose information about crime on or near their campuses.
If a school fails to meet the law’s requirements, the consequences can be severe. The victims in the school community suffer the most from violence and crime, but the Clery Act’s terms hold the institution responsible for inadequate safety and security as well. A university can lose all federal funding—and even face civil penalties—if it fails to meet these requirements. At the same time, a reputation for poor safety can easily sap a university’s enrollment numbers and drive down revenues.
In a poll of college-bound high school seniors, 86% stated that campus safety was a very important factor for their parents in selecting a college – academic quality was identified as very important in 85% of responses – Student Poll
So, how can your university ensure it can satisfy and document the dozens or sometimes hundreds of individual requirements of the Clery Act and keep funding and enrollment up? Great question! Let’s take a deeper look into this.
How do you keep up with a flood of information from multiple sources?
Streamlined data collection and reporting. Maybe the biggest challenge for many universities is collecting and organizing the vast amount of data that must be reported for Clery Act compliance.
- You need to simplify and automate process—even when compiling multiple types of data from sources inside the university and out. This will allow users to generate and publish any of the report types required by the Clery Act, such as the Daily Crime Log, Annual Crime Report, or Fire Log.
Custom reports and metrics. Better yet, the school can also conduct separate tracking and reporting according to its institutional standards (for instance, to include other types of metrics or incident classifications that Clery reporting doesn’t account for).
- Best case scenario, you’ll be able to flag specific types of data for analysis and reporting according the school’s needs—all without affecting the data collection/reporting required by the Clery Act. And by having this information available, you can start looking at trends and analysis to prevent future crime.
How does your school react in a crisis?
Emergency notifications. The Clery Act also requires schools to issue prompt notifications to students, employees, and other members of the school about certain crimes and incidents.
- If there is a school shooting or similar mass event, you need to automatically record warnings, threats, record incident data, and allow ongoing notifications to be sent out right from dispatching or your security operations center (SOC) to authorized individuals. This will ensure all parties have the most up-to-date information.
- Knowing how technically savvy your students and parent are, public-facing notifications should be able to be sent by text message or email in real time. As Ryan Craig had mentioned in his post Smarter Incident Management for Higher Education, seconds matter when responding to an incident.
Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs). It’s critical to implement SOPs that guide staff in meeting Clery requirements while handling emergencies or reports of missing students.
- This is an important way that universities can reduce panic, avoid confusion, and keep all involved parties aware of what steps must be followed in an incident and in what order.
How easily can your team and reporting adapt to change?
Adapting to Clery updates. The Clery Act itself has been revised more than once, introducing new compliance requirements or altering existing ones.
- The demands the Clery Act places on colleges and universities may change along with the schools themselves. For instance, a college that decides to build its first residence hall may need to begin gathering and reporting on fire safety data or missing student reports to ensure continued compliance with the law. How easily can you add additional types of data for tracking as the need arises?
- It’s imperative to incorporate new data guidelines for your Clery reports so that the university is ready for any changes in the law. For example, If a school sets up a campus in another state or even country, it may need to ensure compliance not only with the Clery Act but also with another similar state law, such as Florida’s Jessica Lunsford Act.
Is it time to implement incident management and reporting software?
We’ve touched on a number of critical ways to improve Clery compliance—from collecting and organizing multi-origin data to generating custom reports, from establishing SOPs and emergency notification processes to data trending and sharing. In the long run, this better enables the school to address safety and security issues before they become a threat.
Using an end-to-end incident management and reporting software like Perspective by PPM, universities and colleges have a win-win situation in Clery Act compliance: improved protection, both for the entire university community and for the school’s federal funding.
Ultimately, every school knows there are countless internal and external factors that affect public perception. But no matter how prestigious the college, its reputation for safety (or lack thereof) will always play an important role in student enrollment. Ultimately, schools need to be able to convince prospective students—and their parents—that they will be safe on campus and off.
Interested in learning more about how Perspective can work in your university or college? Click the button below for a personalized demonstration.
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