While traditional universities and four-year colleges receive much attention, community and technical colleges are crucial in providing accessible education, workforce training, and opportunities for diverse populations. These colleges reflect affordability and capacity to bridge educational gaps and help local talent grow. Their importance and role in shaping individuals—and entire communities—cannot be overstated.
For this reason, school leaders should do everything they can to maximize safety on these campuses. Safety can be achieved by understanding your school’s place in the community and its unique safety needs and implementing a school safety plan. School leaders can help protect their school and community by integrating safety solutions into everyday operations.
Community and Technical Colleges Serve Unique Community Needs
Understanding how to protect your community or technical college with school safety solutions begins with evaluating your organization’s role in the community and any potential weaknesses in your current school safety plan.
Accessibility and Affordability. Community and technical colleges boast affordability and accessibility. Although tuition costs at traditional universities continue to rise, community colleges offer budget-friendly options for students who want to pursue higher education but must consider cost. Many low-income and non-traditional students find community colleges the most—and in some cases, the only—viable path to pursue their educational aspirations without amassing debt.
Diverse Student Population. Community and technical colleges welcome diverse students, including high school students enrolled in early college programs, recent high school graduates, working adults, veterans, immigrants, and people pursuing career changes. Diversity in education enriches the learning environment, encouraging the entire community to exchange ideas and experiences. For many students, these colleges provide an atmosphere where they can thrive academically and personally. Some schools even have “open door” admissions policies that allow students at any learning level or stage of life to attend.
Career and Workforce Development. In today’s ever-changing job market, community and technical colleges are essential in equipping students with the skills and knowledge needed to succeed. These colleges offer industry training programs, certificates, and associate degrees so that students can access practical career training aligned with workforce demands. This improves students’ job prospects and enables them to pursue fulfilling careers in high-demand fields such as healthcare, information technology, manufacturing, and skilled trades.
Transfer Opportunities. Many students use community and technical colleges as a stepping stone to four-year universities, taking advantage of transferrable credits to continue their education. These colleges often maintain partnerships with prominent universities, enabling students to pursue bachelor’s degrees at lower costs. This saves money and provides academic opportunities before students commit to a specific major or career path.
Community and technical colleges are indispensable assets for the communities they serve. These institutions are typically smaller and more close-knit than larger universities, but they still require specific safety considerations.
Safety Considerations for Community and Technical Colleges
Community and technical colleges often operate in several locations within a single city or town. This creates several challenges related to campus size and population that warrant making a highly effective school safety plan:
Expansive Campuses and Multiple Buildings. Community and technical colleges can have numerous buildings across the states, making safety monitoring in all campus areas difficult. When there is a lack of visibility, emergency response times can increase, putting lives at risk.
Communication Gaps. Quickly getting help to the right location is the most critical factor in emergencies. Community college campuses and technical schools may present unique challenges regarding communication due to multiple buildings laid out across acres of land, thick walls that interfere with signal strength, outdated wiring, and architectural layouts that complicate connectivity. These campuses need a school safety plan that can work at any campus and eliminate gaps left by some safety solutions.
Vulnerable Areas. Campuses contain many areas that are more vulnerable to safety incidents, such as parking lots, dorms, science labs, and isolated walkways. This is especially true for community and technical colleges, where students and faculty are constantly on and off campus. You need a safety solution that protects those vulnerable areas.
High Foot Traffic and Events. Campus tours, classes, administrative meetings, and other activities can bring familiar and unfamiliar people to school grounds, creating an additional challenge to keeping your community or technical college safe and secure.
The flexibility of community and technical colleges—open campuses, various living arrangements, changing faculty, and other factors—makes them susceptible to safety incidents. Justin Masek, Director of Higher Education at CENTEGIX, says, “The discussion in technical and community colleges is usually about their multiple campuses. There is a main campus and then usually two or three satellite campuses.” Schools are responsible for making sure every inch of their campus is safe, and for community and technical colleges, this means searching for solutions that can cover multiple locations.
The Clery Act is a consumer protection law that aims to provide transparency around campus crime policy and statistics. To comply with Clery Act requirements, colleges and universities must understand what the law entails, where their responsibilities lie, and what they can do to actively foster campus safety.
Community colleges, technical schools, and other higher education organizations can comply with the Clery Act and protect their communities by implementing a school safety plan that uses the right safety technology.
How Do Community Colleges Successfully Implement School Safety Solutions?
CENTEGIX has been a successful safety partner in educational institutions across the country. CENTEGIX helps schools of all types and sizes implement safety solutions to fit their unique needs.
The CENTEGIX Safety Platform™ minimizes identification, notification, and emergency response time. It leverages dynamic digital mapping, real-time locating capabilities, an easy-to-use wearable panic button, and visitor management and reunification capabilities to plan for and respond faster to any safety situation.
What makes the Safety Platform a good fit for community and technical college campuses?
“Practicality. This is a simple solution; there are no language barriers, and one button to click. It’s a 2024 technology, but it’s simple to use. This makes it 100% adoptable. This is valuable when you make it possible for anyone to get help from anywhere on campus. It’s even more valuable that everyone on campus has that technology.”
- Justin Masek
The CENTEGIX Safety Platform Empowers College Staff, Students, and Community Members
“This empowers faculty. It helps them feel more supported. It’s an additional layer of security already within their investments. Typically, these colleges have an open campus. There are no locked doors anywhere. We have to look at it from a leadership perspective. They are thinking of saving lives, what it means to implement this on campus, and if there will be resistance to that.”
- Justin Masek, on how CENTEGIX helps school leaders overcome faculties that may immediately resist technology change.
School leaders see that CENTEGIX technology works, which generates buy-in from staff and the community. In addition to helping to craft your school safety plan, CENTEGIX provides substantial onboarding, training, and ongoing support.
The CENTEGIX Safety Platform™: The Foundation of a Multi-layered Safety Culture
The CENTEGIX Safety Platform™ helps community and technical colleges create a safety culture. Here’s what we offer:
CENTEGIX Safety Blueprint™. With Safety Blueprint, colleges own their maps and mapping data, enabling them to quickly and securely share critical location and safety asset information with law enforcement and first responders in each community they serve. With CENTEGIX Safety Blueprint, staff can easily collaborate with different teams on campus and follow safety protocols for a better outcome.
CENTEGIX CrisisAlert™. CrisisAlert was initially created to reduce response times when unthinkable emergencies happen. When CENTEGIX was designing the CrisisAlert wearable panic button, it prioritized insights from those directly impacted by campus emergencies. With our CrisisAlert wearable panic button, faculty and staff can quickly and discreetly request help at their exact location with the push of a button. Because in a crisis, every second matters.™
CENTEGIX Visitor Management. Whether expanding your campus, upgrading your facilities, or anything in between, you need a way to keep track of independent contractors, vendors, and any other temporary guest with access to restricted areas. Enhanced Visitor Management locates visitors in real-time, informing first responders and administrators during an emergency.
The CENTEGIX Safety Platform integrates seamlessly with other safety investments and public safety agencies to supplement your safety plan. Community and technical colleges can leverage assets they already have, including radios, intercoms, IT networks, and access control, to use in an incident with Safety Blueprint and CrisisAlert.
Every second matters.® The CENTEGIX Safety Platform, featuring the Safety Blueprint critical mapping technology and CrisisAlert wearable panic button, makes a layered and tested campus safety plan possible. CENTEGIX is a national leader in developing innovative safety solutions that empower and protect people every day.
Click here to learn more about what we can do for your college and see a demo of the CENTEGIX Safety Platform.
