Everybody wants to feel safe. Safety brings reassurance, peace of heart, serenity and trust.

College shootings, sexual assaults, bullying and many more are actions illustrate how difficult it is to preserve one’s safety nowadays. Seeing how frequently these events occur nationwide, several questions arose about our safety on Averett’s campus.

Averett Dean of Students Lesley Villarose said she rates Averett’s campus safety a 7 on a scale of 1 to 10 with ten being the highest. She has a few suggestions as to what could make our campus safer.

“The ability to have more safety security have a vehicle or a golf cart to be able to do rounds and to get to situations quicker, or have one central dispatch center where safety and security is more visible and people can call that dispatch line and safety and security carts can roll out,” are some of the suggestions she mentioned.

Averett University has instilled several measures of security to make sure that students’ personal safety needs are met such as establishing several fire drills over the school year so that students can adopt the right behavior in case of a fire emergency or  partnering with Danville Police Department to secure a safe environment for all.

This month being National Preparedness Month, the Averett Emergency Response Team will be giving tips out as well as presentations on emergency procedures for faculty, staff and students. They also encourage the use of the LiveSafe App which is a mobile two-way safety communications platform used by universities and designed specifically to help improve safety.

“Students who feel uncomfortable to out themselves and report something they saw can put in an anonymous tip,” Villarose said .

Even though Averett University Security Staff is doing good as far as implementing measures and educating students in order to help them feel safe, more propositions are being brought to their attention in order to enhance personal security on campus. In fact, provided that it is requested by a large number of students, the school could offer a self defense class that would be taught by Jamie Walker, chief of safety and security.

Keeping doors locked is another way to improve campus safety and is an area where the university is making changes.

“We are transitioning to a different locking system. In Main Hall, in January, students who live in that complex are going to get a different kind of key code in the back of their ID and it is going to be coded. So for instance if I live in Davenport I am not going to be able to get access into the third and fourth floor,” Villarose said.

With the new system, according to Villarose, visitors would need to be let in by the student they were visiting rather than just walking alone into the residence hall.

As we can notice, Averett University Security staff members all work together in order to provide us with a safe campus, however, they should not be the only one working towards it. As students who live on campus it is also our responsibility to say something is we see something. At the back our our students ID’s we are provided with several phone numbers to reach in case of an emergency. It is also our duty to adopt good behavior such as not leaving doors propped open at all times. By working together, our actions for campus safety and security have a better chance of effectiveness.