Safety; Are Schools Safer than Homes?

I have always had a “love-hate” relationship with school, but when it comes to my safety, school is probably a better choice, right?

Wrong.

After today’s incident at my university, I’m starting to question if going there is really worth it. For starters, my school isn’t in a college town. It’s smack-dab in the middle of a bad area.  The surrounding areas are crime-ridden, our students get jumped at the gates at night on a weekly basis, they don’t close school during snowstorms, we have a history of campus fires and after today’s scandal of a bomb threat, I’m pretty much convinced their safety focus is elsewhere.

Don’t get me wrong, I love being a pirate, but after today’s bomb scare I’m quite infuriated with how it was handled. They didn't relay the message via email till almost 20 minutes after the evacuation had begun (3:36PM EDT according to the news article), and even at that the email was weak and uninformative as to what was happening. Here’s the email I had received and the phone call that came in (both are time-stamped)

The phone calls came in almost 15 minutes after it started. I'm disappointed that it took them so long to let me know what was happening, seeing as my father was working there today, we should have been notified sooner. The phone calls that came in were badly recorded computer-faked humans, not even putting a hint of effort into them.

As far as the email goes, “non-specific, unverified threat”, makes it seem as if the university couldn’t care less about our safety, and the fact that “SOPD has advised” makes me believe that SHU was likely to let the students and faculty stay on campus. A threat should be taken seriously, and the officials know that, the fact that SOPD had to “advise” it, to me, means that they couldn’t give a flying **** about our safety. I’m quite disappointed in your handling of this SHU. You should know better. SHAME ON SHU.

I'm happy the police handled it as quick as they could; being not only first responders but the ones who intercepted the threat.

 "We have just been notified by the South Orange Police of an online posting threatening our campus," said Dan Kalmanson, Seton Hall's associate vice president for public relations and marketing.

NOTIFIED BY SOPD.

You mean to tell me that you weren’t even aware of this, SHU? Wow. Considering you’re a technology forward school, I’m quite saddened by the fact that you have not one but multiple facebook pages and networks…

As for SOPD, I’d like to thank them for their hard work and dedication to our student and faculty’s safety. They worked extremely hard today to make sure that we (as a community) were safe. Thank you SOPD for being incredibly alert and responsive for us.