Federal funding to provide more training for campus security administrators

Due to a recent $100,000 federal appropriation to nonprofit campus safety organization Security on Campus, security administrators at Penn will receive additional training on complying with regulations for reporting on-campus crimes this summer.

Intended to finance a “campus crime and emergency response training program”, the funding was distributed under the Fiscal Year 2010 Consolidated Appropriations Act, according to a December press release issued by the bill’s authors, Pennsylvania Senators Arlen Specter and Bob Casey.

According to Security on Campus Executive Director Jonathan Kassa, the organization plans to allocate the funding toward improving its current Jeanne Clery Act compliance training curriculum. Introduced in 1990, the Clery Act requires all institutions of higher education involved with federal financial aid programs to disclose information about crime occurring on or around their campuses.

Security on Campus — which currently provides approximately 2,000 administrators at colleges and universities nationwide with Clery Act compliance training — was prompted to update its curriculum following new amendments to the Higher Education Act introduced in 2008.

“This funding helps to ensure that the laws that Congress has in place for safety on college campuses are updated [in terms of] college administrators and their training,” Kassa said, noting that the funds will enable Security on Campus to “update in line with the new amendments to the Higher Education Act.”

He added that “it would be difficult for a small nonprofit like ours to make the changes without [this] funding.”

“We don’t want to create a gap between what policy and legislation say, and what implementation on the ground is,” he said.

University administrators responsible for filing Penn’s annual Clery Report, in which campus crime statistics are disclosed, currently attend a number of training sessions per year to stay updated on changes in policy.

This is necessary because, according to Vice President for Public Safety Maureen Rush, the Clery Act is constantly evolving.

“Even though [administrators] receive standard training every year, they must still receive updates — this way we ensure that they’re absolutely following the letter and spirit of the law,” she said.

Penn, which received a Jeanne Clery Campus Safety Award in 2003, was selected to host a Clery Act compliance training session this summer.

Kassa and Rush are currently in the process of planning a training session on campus for university administrators both at Penn and nationwide.

Rush characterized the upcoming session as an “opportunity to showcase Penn’s security and safety program” and the University’s adherence to the Clery Act.

As of now, the training — which will address crime data classification methods, ongoing disclosure, victim support services, security policy and the compilation of annual security reports — consists of a 10-hour session likely to be expanded as a result of the Higher Education Act amendments.

“[Our] ultimate goal is to improve and strengthen the systems [schools already have] to increase the safety of all people on campus,” Kassa said.

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