Judging campus mental health and safety resources

~ Experts emphasize there is no way to anticipate an event like the Virginia Tech shooting.

Searching for the right college match, students and parents usually have plenty of questions about topics like class size, dining options and extracurricular activities. But colleges say they get fewer queries on counseling services and campus security.

That could change after the horrific shootings at Virginia Tech. The group Security on Campus, a not-for-profit advocacy group, says a number of high schools are asking for copies of the group's "safety audit," a printed guide to help seniors evaluate campus safety along with other factors as they make their college choice.

Experts emphasize there is no way to anticipate an event like the Virginia Tech shooting. But two big issues it highlighted -- campus mental health services and security -- are topics every student should care about.

Campus crime varies widely by school, but is more widespread than many students realize. Among about 17 million college students, institutions reported relatively few criminal offenses in the category of murder or non-negligent homicide: just 15 on campuses in 2004, and 48 overall, according to federal figures.

Ask the right questions

But large communities of peers living together makes colleges more vulnerable to other types of crime. On-campus alone, there are nearly 40,000 burglaries and more than 3,600 forcible sexual assaults that year.

Experts say there are questions students and parents can ask during the college search to evaluate a college's mental health and security resources.

Counseling: Find out whether a university's counseling center is accredited by the International Association of Counseling Services.

The 200 accredited U.S. universities on the group's Web site are mostly larger schools, but students considering smaller schools can ask many of the same questions of college officials, says Keith Anderson, a staff psychologist at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, chairman of a national task force on counseling center best practices. Among them:

• What is the ratio of counseling staff to students? (IACS suggests one counselor for every 1,000 to 1,500 students).
• Is someone from the counseling center available 24 hours a day?
• Are walk-in appointments available? Without walk-in hours it might take weeks to get a non-emergency appointment.
• Is there a psychiatrist on staff? That's a particularly important question for the growing number of students who arrive on campus already taking medication. If there isn't, students may have to find an off-campus doctor to monitor medication, or have it sent from home.
• Does the counseling center have the resources to focus on prevention, rather than simply treating patients who seek help and respond to emergencies? The best counseling centers have broad outreach programs where they speak regularly to faculty, resident advisers and students about warning signs and available resources, Anderson said.

Look at campus crime statistics: A federal law called the Clery Act requires colleges to release, each year, detailed statistics on campus crime. You can get stats for a particular campus from the U.S. Education Department's Web site, or the site of Security on Campus.

Think about security on a campus visit: The "campus audit" published by Security on Campus suggests a number of questions. Do dorm rooms have safety chains and dead bolts? Are doors left propped open? Are there regular security patrols? The audit also suggests asking colleges about their parental notification policies.

Get information on the campus police force: At some schools, police are sworn officers with full arrest powers who are as well or better trained than their municipal counterparts. Elsewhere, they are more like private security guards who have to call on better-trained law enforcement in a crisis.

Ask whether the campus police force is accredited by the Commission on Accreditation for Law Enforcement Agencies.

A campus with a small or unaccredited police force is not necessarily unsafe, but it needs to have a close working relationship with other area police.

Ask about emergency communications: Virginia Tech faced criticism for failing to notify students after the shooting of the first two students, which happened two hours before 31 more people, including the gunman, were killed across campus. Police said they believed the first two victims were part of a domestic dispute, but said even if they had tried to shut the campus down, getting the word out to thousands of students and faculty would be difficult.

Better emergency communications with students was already on the agenda at many colleges, but has become more urgent after Virginia Tech. Some schools, like the universities of Washington and Iowa, are considering warning sirens and outdoor speakers; others are trying to see if new cell phone technologies might help (one problem: it's hard for colleges to keep track of students' cell phone numbers).

Ask about a college's current capabilities -- and plans -- for reaching students in an emergency.

-----

On the Net:

http://www.securityoncampus.org

http://www.ed.gov/admins/lead/safety/campus.html

http://www.calea.org/

http://www.iaclea.org/

http://www.iacsinc.org/