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With the recent shooting at North Park Elementary School, we can’t help but wonder if we’re prepared enough for a similar event here at Riverside City College.
Although we have the Rave Guardian app available for students, only about 1,600 students have it downloaded, according to Michael Simmons the Director of Risk Management, Safety and Police.
With the app students can be notified immediately when an incident is occurring as well as through email with updated contact information. “Guardians” such as a parent, sibling or other trusted individual can be assigned so they can also be notified as well if you are in a dangerous situation.
We became aware of the app last year, but according to Simmons the app has been in place for three years. Yet he said they’re currently putting together a campaign for it to be more widely recognized and used.
Simmons said active shooter seminars are available upon request from administration for students, faculty and the general public throughout the district.
According to Simmons, as many as six to seven have occurred within the last year the most recent one occurring last week.
Even though several seminars are better than none, why hasn’t administration been requesting more of these seminars?
We have had enough events of this nature hit close to home.
An online active shooter preparedness online course is in the making, but is estimated to be complete during the spring semester of next year, according to Simmons.
We need resources available to us right now. Places and sites we can go to whenever we need to.
Under the current campus police emergency preparedness page on the college website it leads to seven different links.
At this time only one of the seven links is active and it is the link to the Riverside Community College District Emergency Plan.
This too is in the process of being integrated to a single template to include all elements of the now bigger department. It should be ready by the end of this calendar year, according to Simmons.
As understandable as that may seem, that still leaves about eight months of inaccessible links, that could be otherwise useful for our campus community.
Viewpoints’ editorials represent the majority opinion of and are written by the Viewpoints’ student editorial board.
