(By Alexis McCarney ’25, staff writer)
A lack of communication is causing fear and confusion among students.
LVC’s campus safety and board have decided to phase out a staple safety feature, the blue light call boxes. These boxes have been on campus since 1988 and have received updates over the years. They offer a way to receive assistance without a cell phone.
The purpose of these boxes is to be able to notify campus safety if a student feels unsafe on campus. They can be seen from any spot on campus and have provided a sense of safety for LVC students and families for decades.
“After initially hearing of the blue light removals on campus, I was quite concerned,” Samantha Miller, senior, said. “Having the emergency blue lights around campus gives students an extra layer of security and protection.”
In 2021, the most recent year on record, more than 23,400 criminal incidents were reported on college campuses throughout the United States, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Educational settings have drawn high levels of violence in recent decades.
“This is only week five of this school year, but it already has been the scariest,” Hailey Trump, senior, said. “There have been multiple people (both students and non-students) who have been harassing students and making people feel extremely unsafe. I no longer feel safe walking outside of my dorm alone, especially at night. So, when I heard that the blue lights will be removed my fear heightened even more.”
LVC is going entirely digital in its emergency response program with an app called OmniAlert, which the college has used for multiple years as a broad alert system. The new app will allow students to add an emergency contact and have the option to call campus safety. This is a beneficial service for students who always have access to a cell phone.
It is easy to take cell phones for granted at this point, where almost everyone has one. However, assuming that every single person has one is dangerous. Cell phones have many flaws, such as spotty reception, batteries dying and simply the time it can take to unlock and open an app. These issues could make an already bad situation worse.
“If I drop my phone in the time of an emergency, there will be no way for me to get help,” Trump said. “The blue lights are not only for our safety, but also meant to scare off the attacker. Now there is nothing that will do that.”
If students are planning on parking their car and their cell phone is dead, President MacLaren advises students to go to campus safety and ask them for escort if one’s cell phone is dead or if one is feeling unsafe.
Going completely digital excludes people in these situations. When there is an emergency, there may not be much time to pull out a cell phone. The blue lights have always been a reassurance that if something happened, someone could press the button and alert authorities to the area without having to stand around and talk into the box. However, that is apparently not the case.
“Sadly, suppose you were having a medical emergency and could not communicate. In that case, emergency dispatchers pass it off as a false alarm and relay it to the officers as non-emergency due to the hundreds of pranks or fake incidents a year,” Brian Boyer, supervisor of campus safety, said.
If students were unaware of the vetting process for responses for the boxes, they would not know if they pressed the button, someone may not come.
In the first ‘Fireside Chat’ of the semester with President MacLaren, students were informed that the blue lights currently in disrepair will come down first. However, there was no answer on which ones are currently broken. The functioning ones will remain until they are no longer operable.
“As they begin to remove [the blue lights], I think there needs to be better communication to students on how to activate the OmniAlert app and use its services,” Miller said.
Per Dean Bob Mikus, students will be kept in the loop regarding when and which boxes are being removed.