Professors, TAs Unaware of Safety Protocols

Student safety in the classroom at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM) is not as secure as you would hope.

Although teaching assistants and professors receive safety instructions during an orientation, a Media Milwaukee investigation has uncovered that teaching staff on the UW-Milwaukee campus – ranging from a department chair to teaching assistants – don’t know what they are supposed to do during safety emergencies.

According to Colleen Murphy, the director of University Safety and Assurances (U.S.A.), new faculty, including professors, go through an orientation with Human Resources department. Murphy also said that fire and tornado drills are opportunities for staff to practice the safety knowledge they are taught at this orientation.

According to the U.S.A. website,the procedure for a fire is “Step 1: Activate Alarm Step 2: Dial 9-911 (or from a cell phone Dial 229-9911) Step 3: Evacuate the Building.” The site continues with what to do if an individual is in a variety of fire related situations. The site does not say what a professor or teaching assistant should do if they are teaching a class and there is a fire. For tornados, the policy is to get to a tornado shelter area, and the website outlines where each of the tornado shelters are.

Zach Steuerwald, assistant director of University Safety and Assurances, said that HR doestell professors that they have responsibility of their students well they are in their class. With that, he also said that professors are told at this orientation to look for the “escape” routes posted on a wall around their classrooms or on the podium in their lecture halls. The teacher is in charge of knowing this procedure and if any medical emergencies arise, they are told to call campus police. What we have found is this speech fell flat and was lost on most TAs and professors.

Person after person told Media Milwaukee they didn’t know what the protocols contain and, if they received any training, they don’t recall it.

When talking to different TAs around campus, it became clear that each person took something different away from their orientation. Some remembered how to handle fires and others  couldn’t remember if their orientation had any safety training at all.

Hilary Rasmussen, a TA for the public speaking course, said, “I do not know what to do in case of a school shooting.” Rasmussen was not alone in this lack of knowledge.

When asked about protocols on active shooters on campus Michelle Fetherston, a TA for communications 105, said “I can’t remember if they talked about that in orientation or not, if they did it was minimal.”

Safety instruction also can differ at the department level. Ben Baker, a TA for communications 103, said that he did receive training for various emergency situations, but it was through the communications department not UWM’s department of Safety and Assurances.

Angie Ogan, the Risk Management Specialist at UWM, said “Safety protocols are specific to the area of study. Safety protocols for a math professor and TA is different than that of an art department.”

Ogan shared the PowerPoint that she shows at TA orientation. It goes over the basics: fires, tornados, active shooters, personal safety on campus, and text alerts.

This was not made clear to some department heads. David Backes, a professor for the Journalism, Advertising, and Media Studies program (JAMS) and the department chair for JAMS, said, “I have not been told of any department chair responsibilities [relating to safety]. And yet one of the things that often happen at the university is that people, who enter positions such as department chair, are not told ahead of time what they are supposed to know.”

This gap does not concern many of the TAs around campus. Most said they could follow their intuition and be just fine without set safety protocols, but they would like to have something to fall back on.

“It’s such a hard thing to train for [emergency situations],” Fetherston said. “You do have situations where people are teaching in buildings they are not familiar with, and they may not know the quickest way out of the building. And that could be a problem.”

After talking with TAs on campus we went around asking professors if they knew the basic safety protocols for tornados, fires, active shooters and violent students. We found that not many professors know what school policy is.

Derek Nazareth, a professor in the school of business teaching information technology, has been teaching at UWM for over 20 years. Nazareth remembered he had an orientation but did not recall there being any safety protocols mentioned at all. “Primarily it was here’s what you need to know in terms of procedures in dealing with HR,” Nazareth said.

When asked if he knew what to do in an emergency situation,Nazareth replied, “I would follow what I would refer to as “common sense procedures.” The procedures he described for fire and tornados were comparable to that of U.S.A. For an active shooter,he was unsure of what to do. He said, “I’m sure there are procedures, and I am sure at some point in time I may have glanced over them, but I don’t recall what they are right now.”

Kent Redding teaches sociology 101 and a few graduate level courses. He has been teaching at UWM for almost 12 years. He has never had any safety issues arise in any of his classes. Redding recalled his orientation, saying that he did not recall much of anything being mentioned about safety. He said that there are cards at the podium for all his class with instructions for fires and tornados. He described what he would do with his 101 class that can have upwards of 400 students in an emergency situation and Redding also expressed his “common sense procedures” that he would follow.

All of the professors interviewed said that not knowing UWM’s set protocols for emergencies is not a hindrance to their teaching. For most of the professors that were interviewed nothing has ever come up in the classroom in their many years of teaching. All the professors and TAs felt a responsibility for their student’s safety and expressed some concern for not fully knowing procedure.

Some safety situations – such as fires – appear to get greater attention than others.

Fire drills are mandatory in Wisconsin, according to the Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA). This mandates that any business or corporation with more than 10 employees is required to have regular fire drills.

UWM has its fair share of fire drills. Caitlin Penzey Moog, a TA for JAMS 201, said, “Whenever a fire alarm goes off… no one takes it seriously because it is always a drill.” Penzey Moog said that the other day the fire alarm went off in Bolton Hall, and no one did anything.

Chris Caldwell, a substitute for the Communications Department, said, “as much as I would love to believe that every graduate level student that goes through training actively pays attention to the entirety of the day and a half worth of training I know that I can’t be that naive.”

Taylor Pamperin, academic department associate for the JAMS department, is one of the floor captains for the fifth floor of Bolton. Pamperin said that she put on her yellow vest and knocks on office doors to make sure everyone is participating in drills. She knows where the tornado shelter area for her floor is and what to do in case of a fire. UWM trained her in this aspect and she regularly gets emails and has meetings with the building chair and other floor captains.

The building chair for Bolton hall is Luis C. Saavedra. Saavedra is primarily the outreach specialist for the Roberto Hernandez center. According to Saavedra, there is a building chair and an alternate for each building on camps.

The chair’s job is to voice the concerns of the people in that building. Saavedra said, “When we get notifications from police, for example, we’ll get be on the lookout for somebody because they’ve been coming around and snatching things. So I’ll send a picture out to staff and faculty to be on the lookout.” He said he sends out emails about safety and building updates to all faculty members in Bolton hall. U.S.A. has bi-yearly meeting with all of the building chairs to talk about what is going on around camps.

Fetherston said she may have been trained on some safety protocols, but she was trained and then it was forgotten.

Penzey Moog said in case of an active shooter she would shut her classroom door and call 911 or campuses police. When asked if she had campus police’s number in her phone she said, “No. and if I do it is only because my neighbors my freshman year liked to throw ruckus parties.”

Sometimes intuition is not enough. In fact, professor Backes said he had a student have an epileptic seizure in his class. At the beginning of the semester the student told Backes about his epilepsy but told Backes not to worry because he had not had a seizure in a long time.

“If he [the student] hadn’t told me what to do I wouldn’t have had a clue and I might have done the wrong thing” Backes said. He also said that, besides drills, in his 26 years at UWM Backes has never been taught what to do in emergency situations.

UWM Assistant Police Chief, Greg Habeck, said there are at least 12 active shooter trainings offered around campus a year. Habeck said that the training offers are posted in the weekly new letters and that in the fall the police department is going to start a more aggressive campaign for students and faculty to attend this training. Murphy said that fire and tornado drills are good practice as well for the UWM population. Although there is training for faculty and refresher courses are offered there is still a gap. All of the TAs and professors interviewed are saying the same things.

“I think it would be good to have everything reiterated because if something goes wrong where do all the eyes turn?” Rasmussen said.

Learn more about safety protocols at UWM from the University Safety and Assurances website at http://www4.uwm.edu/usa/safety/general/.

To learn more about active shooter training and what to do in case of an active shooter visit the UWM police department’s website at http://uwm.edu/police/safety/trainings/active-shooter-training/.