Citrus College hosted an informative forum in two sessions for all staff on Feb. 14, regarding to the lockdown that happened on Jan.15.
Both sessions ran for one hour each, from 10 a.m. to 11 a.m, and another one at 2:45 p.m. to 3:45 p.m.
The forum was part of Citrus College’s recovery process after the lockdown.
Benjamin Macias, Campus Safety supervisor, led the forum presentation by explaining the collaborations that Campus Safety holds with local law enforcement.
Glendora Police Department is the closest law enforcement organization to Citrus College, located about 1.2 miles away.
Even in the vicinity of GPD, Citrus College also has multiple systems that Campus Safety uses in order to effectively communicate with as much of the attending population as possible in case of a crisis.
Systems like the Citrus Guardian phone app allow students, teachers and faculty alike be able to contact Campus Safety from a button away. Citrus Alerts also help inform students and teachers through text notifications. The Alertus system allows for mass notifications to be sent out through all the computers on campus, beacons and speakers.
After that, Macias recapped the timeline about the events that had transpired during the lockdown, however, due to it being an active case, some details could not be released.
Throughout the duration of the incident, it was said that around 500 calls were made to Campus Safety, however only one dispatcher was available to answer the calls. Macias also mentioned that there was only two Campus Safety officers on duty during the start of the lockdown.
The lack of staff was not the only adversity that Campus Safety faced that day. The rapid influx of information on social media made it harder for Campus Safety to compete with in order to share accurate information. Many people went on Twitter trying to find updates for the lockdown, but were met with circulating rumors and misinformation.
Macias said that when people are putting out inaccurate information, it can jeopardize the safety of everyone.
“People are making assumptions based on the things that they’re seeing on social media and the majority of those times, the things they see on social media are incorrect,” Macias said. “There was a lot of posts and a lot of tweets that there was an active shooter, ‘They were doing this, they were doing that,’ which was false.”
However, Citrus College has made efforts in planning for the future, in the possibility of a lockdown happening again. About 200 emergency lockdown kits, equipped with five gallon buckets, tissue paper, sanitary wipes and gloves, were ordered to be placed in classrooms.
For future plans in communication, Campus Safety wants to work on continuing on having emergency messages already prepared, so that they can release the messages quicker in a future situation. Also, they hope to implement a hard wired phone system, in case if the school’s network were to crash, there would still be a backup way to send messages.
Macias said that the campus was 75 percent of the way to equipping all classroom doors with thumb turns that will lock the doors with a deadbolt.
As a way to gather feedback, there was an online survey that was provided in the e-mail about the forum.
Economics professor Christine Styles had suggested that for safety training, it should be held in-person, not on the web or video form.
Even though the lockdown had taken over six hours to become cleared, Macias stressed the importance of the outcome from the ordeal.
“Yes it may, in some people’s opinions took a while,” Macias said, “Yes, sometimes it was uncomfortable. But at the end of the day, this was what was most important, we all went home at the end of the day. Nobody died and nobody got injured, and that is huge.”
