Virginia Tech Victims Families Joined With Higher Education Experts to Create Campus Safety Self-Assessment
In my campus safety advocacy and consulting with institutions of higher education over the last three decades the most common key to success I’ve seen is multidisciplinary collaboration. Based on this principle I oversaw creation of the VTV Family Outreach Foundation’s 32 National Campus Safety Initiative (32 NCSI) between 2012 and 2015. VTV was founded by the families of the victims and survivors of the 2007 mass casualty incident at Virginia Tech.
The 32 NCSI program now offered by NASPA, the nation’s largest student affairs professional association, provides institutions with a comprehensive campus safety self-assessment tool. Prior to the beginning of the upcoming school year is a perfect time to participate to make sure all campus safety bases are covered.
32 NCSI consists of nine focus areas: Alcohol and Other Drugs, Campus Public Safety, Emergency Management, Hazing, Mental Health, Missing Students, Physical Security, Sexual Violence, and Threat Assessment. They are designed to be worked on together by professionals from across an institution.
Please visit https://www.naspa.org/project/32-ncsi to learn more about how your institution can participate. There is a relatively nominal charge. In the interests of full disclosure VTV has long been a pro-bono client of SAFE Campuses, LLC, and we receive no proceeds from the fees NASPA charges.
“We are going to create a living legacy,” the then president of the foundation, Joseph T. Samaha, said of 32 NCSI’s initial launch in 2015. The 32 in the name is a memorial to the 32 students and faculty killed. 32 NCSI was the campus safety companion to the victims’ rights work of VTV. Now that VTV is focused primarily on victims’ rights NASPA hosts the self-assessment because of their much greater reach in higher education.
In founding the project, we recruited a group of the nation’s leading experts from higher education in a wide range of fields to ensure that the standards to be assessed would be those of most use to professionals at colleges and universities. This fusion of advocacy with practice informed expertise was essential to our work. Our lead experts were Prof. Peter F. Lake (Advisory Council Chair); David S. Burns, CEM; E.R. (Gene) Deisinger, Ph.D.; Jason D. Friedberg; Connie Kirkland, MA, NCC, CTS; Hank Nuwer; Jeffrey W. Pollard, PhD, ABPP; Dan Reilly; and Jen Day Shaw, Ph.D..
