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Fairfield University made strides in doing that when the university's Department of Public Safety recently hosted its seventh annual Campus Public Safety Officer Training Academy.
Campus safety officers from high schools and higher education around the Northeast were in attendance, taking courses and training exercises in everything ranging from social media to bomb threat recognition, according to a press release.
"It’s all about the training,” Frank Ficko, associate director of campus public safety, said in a press release. “You can have the best policies and procedures in place, but if you don’t back it up by properly training your first responders, those procedures aren’t worth the paper they’re written on.”
Some courses are physical, like the pepper spray course, during which attendees were pepper sprayed.
Some were in the classroom, like the social media course, where attendees learned how to use social media to their benefit, as well as some of the potentially damaging effects social media can have for students and campuses.
Participants also learned how to see, feel and recognize bombs during a training course.
“Some of the public safety officers who attend are initially apprehensive and skeptical about the training program,” Ficko said in the press release. “But by then end of the week, they come to realize it was the best week of training they’ve ever received.”
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