Colleges Re-Examining Safety after Arizona Shooting Rampage

(The Wall Street Journal) - Community colleges are examining their safety programs as they see more mental illness in their student populations, an issue highlighted by the Arizona shooting suspect, whose behavior on campus had alarmed school officials, The Wall Street Journal reported in its Tuesday edition.

Their scrutiny comes as enrollment grows and state funding shrinks for these colleges, which serve tens of thousands of students, many of them adults, who may take just a class or two and almost never live on campus.

In recent interviews, administrators said they were now looking for gaps in security policies they adopted following the Virginia Tech massacre in 2007.

"We feel the need to pay more attention to this subject than before," said Rolando Montoya, provost at Miami Dade College, which hired a consultant in the fall to help it formalize the procedures it uses to identify and deal with troubled students.

Schools that do not have such "threat assessment" programs are contacting consultants to develop plans, said Brett A. Sokolow, managing partner of one such firm, the National Center for Higher Education Risk Management. "They all want to know how quickly you can set this up," he said.

Months before allegedly firing on Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) and 19 others on Jan. 8, Jared Lee Loughner is said to have displayed signs of disturbance that frightened teachers and students at Tucson's Pima Community College. In reports made public after the shooting, campus police said Loughner appeared to be suffering from a mental illness.

Source: The Wall Street Journal