Department of Communications takes classroom safety precautions

The Department of Communication has taken an interest in the safety of students and professors alike during a crisis situation after a student disrupted class and threatened a Public Relations professor last semester.
Department of Communication Assistant Professor JJ McIntyre said, “We really didn’t know as a department how to deal with this situation.”
The professors in the department researched their options and discovered the university’s Behavioral Intervention Plan.
“If an incident like this happens, faculty and students alike are supposed to fill out this form and send it in to the Behavioral Intervention Team, which they then evaluate. So they want as many perspectives as they can on the incident, but most people don’t know about this and so what had happened was we filled out one form and we filled it out like a month after the incident,” McIntyre said.
Dean of Students Gary Roberts serves as a member of the Behavioral Intervention Team.
“The most serious case is where we do have the Behavioral Intervention Team in place for very serious issues where a student poses a threat to themselves or others and we review it and go from there. But in most cases it is going to be handled at the classroom level,” he said.
The Department of Communication made changes on a departmental level to help assess the role of a professor in the case of a crises situation.
“We’ve started doing a lot more crises planning in the event of school shootings, but a lot of that is just for students and for UCAPD. A lot of teachers receive little to no training or the same training as students and they don’t have the same responsibilities,” McIntyre said.
Part of defining the roles of professors was to come up with a plan that would be used by the whole department.
“We ended up basically using the same statement the writing department uses. So now everybody’s going to put that in the syllabus. Basically what it says it that the professor has the right to kick anybody out of class who they deem as a disruption or unhealthy. Before that we really didn’t know if faculty have the right to do that but we have since found out that they do,” McIntyre said.
McIntyre said he hopes to shed light on this issue campus-wide and have a centralized location to keep track of incidents where students become disruptive in class.
“We don’t really have any central place that keeps track of incidents. That’s what we found. I think that departments need to communicate better with one another. The police come and they may respond to an incident but other departments or people that may have a problematic student in a class don’t share that with everyone who has that student in clas,” he said.
Students need to be aware that problematic students could be any where on campus, he said.
“If a student has some kind of inappropriate behavior before we don’t have a place to really keep all of that. You may have multiple strikes on campus and there’s no central place to keep that knowledge, at least that I’m aware of. That’s something that needs to be addressed,” McIntyre said.
McIntyre wants to bring experts in different areas of safety in on the conversation.
“We’re looking to bring in different areas of expertise on campus to come in and help inform our discussion. We want to have members of BIT come and talk to us about their information needs, what would help them make better decisions, quicker decisions. We want to help the police and have them come tell us how should we respond to someone who‘s being verbally aggressive or physically aggressive,” McIntyre said.
He also said students should be more aware of their surroundings and become responsible for personal safety.
“I think it’s important for students in this post Virginia Tech era to know that there’s a lot of personal responsibility you have as a student and safety is one of them. The school can do so much to create a safe atmosphere but the student also has to be responsible for making good choices in incredibly difficult situations,” McIntyre said.
He said students need to learn responsibility, as well.
“They have to be responsible to sign up for text alerts, they have to be responsible to know what to do with themselves if there were an active shooter on campus because somebody might not be there to tell them.  That doesn’t mean you have to walk around campus afraid all the time but you walk around campus with a new awareness and I think being mindful of your environment is always a good thing.”
McIntyre also said the department has learned from the event and plans to keep the conversation about safety ongoing.
“We’re trying to move forward in a positive way from an incident that could have been very negative,” he said.