Editorial: Intervention a key component in campus protections
A day after the shootings at Umpqua Community College in Oregon last week, Elgin Community College officials announced ECC had become the first college in the suburbs to become a Ready to Respond Campus. The designation from the Illinois Emergency Management Agency indicates that ECC is ready to handle just about any imaginable disaster, whether it be an act of God or man.
"It's so important these days," ECC Police Chief Emad Eassa told Staff Writer Madhu Krishnamurthy. "It lets the public know that this is a safe school for people in the community to send their students. We met all the criteria to allow us to respond to any type of crises that could occur on our campus."
Patti Thompson, a spokeswoman for the state agency, said the Ready to Respond designation is not geared just to school shootings but to severe weather and disease outbreaks. Although ECC is one of just five colleges and universities across the state to seek and obtain the designation in the 20-month-old program, Thompson expects others to follow.
So do we.
When you send your child away to school - even if that school is a few miles away - you worry. It's natural. This should alleviate some of that worry for parents as well as for students. But only some of it.
Last week's tragedy in Oregon left nine dead and seven wounded. Had Umpqua achieved this level of accreditation, it's conceivable that the death toll would have been lower. Part of the Ready to Respond criteria is fast and organized response.
But equally important is that ECC has a behavioral intervention team of specialists, including wellness professionals, who meet regularly to resolve threats and issues with students before they escalate. Without that focus, it would be treating the symptom - not the disease.
In order to prevent school shootings from occurring in the first place, schools and we as a society need to pay greater attention to mental health issues and discuss them just as we would cancer. Remember when cancer was only spoken of in hushed tones?
As we noted in Sunday's editorial, it's important that news outlets report responsibly on such tragedies so that we don't feed the fantasies of those who might consider being the next in line to do such a thing.
This is why the Daily Herald embarked this year on a series of stories that follows the people on the front lines of the growing mental health gap in the suburbs. It's an outgrowth of our series started last year on those who are fighting the heroin epidemic.
On Sunday, we'll publish a story from Staff Writer Marie Wilson about how police departments responding to a larger number of mental health calls are shifting their mission from just dealing with the problem at hand to helping to find solutions for people in mental crisis.
If we're ever to put an end to school shootings and really make our campuses safer, we need to approach it from the perspective of people in need of intervention as well as figuring out what to do once they're on campus with a loaded gun.