DOMINICK CORSI
Special to The Leader
When you walk into a new classroom, what’s the first thing you look for? Are you worried about what seats are available? Do you make sure you can see the board at the front of the room? Maybe you just want a seat by a window or near the door.
Before doing any of that, check if the door to your classroom has a lock on it. The chances are it does, but up until very recently, that has not always been the case.
SUNY Fredonia is in the final stages of a project that reinforces the safety of students and faculty by installing locks on every door on campus. The capital project was approved by SUNY after being proposed before the pandemic took effect, which stalled the project’s completion.
Almost 400 doors have had locks installed in them, with a few more to be completed. Buildings like McEwen Hall or any of the residence halls were left untouched because of the keycard locks that are already installed on those doors.
University Police have the ability to unlock these doors from the outside, while students or staff can lock the doors from the inside. The type of lock will differ based on the building the door is in.
Classrooms, lecture halls, offices and other spaces have all gotten security improvements.
This project was proposed for lockdown or lock-in scenarios where there would be an intruder or immediate threat to campus. Previously, some classroom doors would not have the ability to be locked, which proposed a danger to students and staff.
According to the Emergency Health and Services website at fredonia.edu, the procedure when dealing with an emergency lockdown or active shooter advises students to “run, hide, and fight.” To follow through with this procedure, having lockable doors seems to make the hiding aspect easier.
The construction cost is pegged at $487,795.
SUNY Fredonia Emergency Planning Coordinator Charles Holder, said, “This is just one better way of hiding if you need to do it. Hey, we’re spending half a million dollars on something that probably will never, ever be used.”
That should not take away from the fact that having these locks is a step toward promoting campus safety at Fredonia. University Police Chief Brent Isaacson has boasted about “the campus-wide commitment to keep [the] university an extraordinarily safe place.”
Having locks on doors is not necessarily something that people usually think of as a luxury; it’s more of an essential safety protection, especially for schools these days.
SUNY Fredonia’s campus is not small by any means. There are 62 buildings on campus.
Some of those buildings include very open concepts, which is not ideal when it comes to holding an actual lockdown because of the lack of hiding spots and the overly-easy access somebody would have to some rooms.
Having locks on doors would likely be helpful, but that doesn’t change the fact that some places on campus were not constructed with student safety at the forefront of the planning.
“I think we were behind on the trend of having lockable doors. When I got here, it surprised me that a lot of the larger halls and lecture halls were not able to be locked,” Holder said.
For current students, lockdowns have always been an integral part of our educational careers. Throughout grade school, some districts hold monthly lockdowns. But in college, it gets significantly more difficult to put such eerie procedures in place.
“So you guys know that the campuses are so difficult to hold lockdowns because our campus is wide open. People are constantly coming in and out, on and off campus,” Holder said. “And it’s not like we can control all of the students by saying, ‘Okay, we’re gonna do a lockdown drill today, you guys gotta stay in your classrooms.’ There’s no such thing.”
Holder stressed that all students and staff on campus should be signed up for NY-Alert.
NY-Alert is the State University of New York Emergency Alert System. Holder advised that students can and should sign up for NY-Alert through YourConnection. In the case of a lockdown, students and staff would get a notification sent to their phones (either through a phone number or email) that will inform students of the emergency
Again, the hope is to never have to use the system, but it’s best to have it in place and ready to go just in case an emergency ever happens. On top of lockdowns, NY-Alert could also notify students about a shelter-in-place or weather emergency.
SUNY Fredonia also has an extended list of emergency procedures on their website that you can check out.