April 2017 Progress Update:
The District has engaged Margolis-Healy, a nationally-recognized campus safety consulting firm, to provide us with a comprehensive review of our public safety operations and to make recommendations in areas where the District would benefit from industry best practices.
Beginning last fall, Margolis-Healy held 15 public forums, conducted nearly 80 stakeholder interviews and administered a questionnaire to all students and employees in the District which resulted in more than 700 responses. The students also administered a survey to students which resulted in more than 1,000 responses. Additionally, numerous students and employees have attended Board meetings and shared their views with Trustees and staff. This valuable feedback is proving critical and informative as Margolis-Healy finalizes their assessment and prepares their recommendations. To ensure that everyone had an opportunity to be engaged in this process, and because there was so much important feedback, we have discovered that our original timeline for completing and processing this initial report was too conservative. Needless to say, we have exceeded our timeline estimates – which is perfectly fine because we want to make sure that this issue gets processed fully and properly.
We expect to receive the final report from Margolis-Healy in the coming weeks. But, because we are very late in the semester, we will postpone any campus community review of the study until we return for the fall semester in September. This new timeline will allow us to fully engage the participatory governance process at each campus and at the District. We will re-engage on this topic when the new school year begins, so please look for meeting notices and opportunities to join us in this important discussion in the fall.
For more information about the study, please visit the Public Safety Services Study webpage.
In January 2017, SMCCCD Associated Students conducted a Public Safety Student Survey during Welcome Week. Cañada College received survey responses from 215 students! The Student Survey report summarizes the results for Cañada.
The college safety committee meets the third Monday of every month at 11 am. All are welcome to attend. For more information about the committee, please contact Mary Chries Concha Thia, conchathiam@smccd.edu