Warning chill

From the News Star:



Warning chill to the world
It is every parent's nightmare, the worst turn imaginable, when we bundle up our children and send them off to school.
That's how it is with our toddlers in pre-K, our growing children in elementary and high schools.
It is no less the case when our sons and daughters leave the nest and head off to college. We want them to succeed, and we want them to be safe. It's a dangerous world, and there are so many things that can go wrong.
At the University of Central Arkansas, the world intruded on idyllic campus life Sunday night when four men — none of them were students — unloaded their weapons. That's the storyline police, who hold four suspects in custody, are investigating.
Dead in the wake of the mayhem were Ryan Henderson, 18, and Chavares Block, 19, both UCA students and Arkansas residents. Police believe they may have been simple bystanders when the shooting commenced.
"This is an incredibly heinous case," local prosecutor Marcus Vaden said. "When you have a situation where it appears some, if not all of the victims, were innocent bystanders, that's bad."
Bad on the two young men who lost their lives. Bad on a third young man, a non-student, wounded in the leg. Bad on a student body that believed their scholarly corner of the world was same from the heresy of random crime. But not now.
It was bad, too, on Monroe-area students at UCA, among them Matt Dickerson and Darrius McNeal, Neville High graduates, who fielded inquiries throughout the night from friends and family who worried for their safety. Everyone, it seems, knows somebody there.
Dickerson called his father to assure him he was OK. McNeal said he had class with one of the shooting victims.
Both young men described the mood on campus as somber, as authorities sifted through the wreckage of Sunday's events to solve the crime. Somber at UCA. Somber in Conway, a pleasant town some 30 minutes from Little Rock.
But the tragic events that played out there have likely shaken the confidence of parents of all 12,500 UCA students. No one bargains for this when they search with their sons and daughters for colleges, drive them to campus and decorate their dorms rooms.
Come Monday, UCA parents might have been a million miles away from the alleyway where one victim died, finding his final rest on a sidewalk between a dorm and the fine arts center. But their thoughts had to drift to what had happened.
It's not a long ride from Central Arkansas to northeastern Louisiana, where three colleges and a community college are located. It doesn't take a great stretch in imagination to consider that no matter how hard campuses try to ensure safety, bad things can happen.
They know that at Central Arkansas, where a cold-blooded crime sent a warning chill to the rest of the world.

At Belmont University

University of Alaska Anchorage - Making sense of the stats

Living in a state with the highest rate of sexual assaults per capita, it is reassuring to know that only one of the 257 rapes reported in Anchorage in 2007 occurred at UAA.

The Jeanne Clery Disclosure of Campus Security Policy and Campus Crime Statistics Act require that every university that participate in federal student aid programs must disclose information about crime on their campuses. The act is a response to 19-year-old Clery's rape and murder at her residence hall at Lehigh University in 1986. Clery's parents found out after her death that 38 violent crimes had occurred on campus in the three years prior.

According to our Campus Safety and Security Report 08, 139 liquor law violations and 25 drug law violations were recorded in 2007. The report also shows that there was only one forcible sex offense recorded on campus.

The Anchorage Police Department considers UAA in it's South Anchorage service district, where there were 154 cases of sexual assault reported in 2007 according to numbers provided by APD. That is the highest number of assaults in all Anchorage's reported districts.

At UAF, four sex offenses were reported in 2007. The city of Fairbanks has a smaller population size than Anchorage and the student body at UAF is just under 10,000 students - about half the number that UAA has.

UAA's report shows that a number of students on campus are partaking in the consumption of alcohol, a substance that is proven to alter judgment, so it's a surprise that the number of sexual assaults on campus remains so low.

For the incident of rape to be documented and accounted for, it must first be reported by the victim. And while many victims do not step forward following an assault, as a student body we should be able to report any criminal incident at any time without fear or worry.

In the case of a sexual assault, The Sexual Assault Reponse Team will report to the crime scene. This team is made up of a state trooper or a police officer, a nurse examiner, and a STAR advocate, who is present to support the victim. Although our school has this team of expertise to offer students in the incidence of a sexual assault, it is possible that some sexual assaults are not being reported to the officials.

Students must be educated on the presence of sexual assaults and all crime, for that matter, on campus and in the community, in order to better protect themselves and be aware of what takes place on our campus.

Orange Taylor trail - Eastern Michigan

From the murder trial at EMU, where a coed was murdered in her dorm room.

Theft

A friend of our family has a daughter at Kansas University and the girl had given her mother a call one morning when she went outside to go to her car in the dorm parking lot. The girl said, "I can't find my car."

The mom, trying to give here daughter a pep talk said, "Now I can't come over there and find your car for you - keep looking and you'll find it."

But Mom....

As it turns out, the girl searched the entire parking lot and it was gone, with the spot she though she had parked it littered with broken glass.

The car was stolen and hasn't been recovered. Someone said that students at KU have had so much problem with theft at KU that some have left messages on their window that "There's nothing worth stealing in here"

Who are these thieves? Certainly the days of leaving the computer and bike unattended, the cars unlocked and the dorm room door open are long gone, never to return.

Older, sadder and wiser.

NYT: Curbing binge drinking

From the NYT:

Of all the advice parents give to children heading off to college, warnings about alcohol — and especially about abusing alcohol — may be the most important. At most colleges, whether and how much students drink can make an enormous difference, not just in how well they do in school, but even whether they live or die.

Every state has a minimum drinking age of 21, and the vast majority of college students are younger than that. Yet drinking, and in particular drinking to get drunk, remains a major health and social problem on campuses. Car crashes and other accidental injuries, sexual assaults, fights, community violence, academic failure and deaths from an overdose of alcohol are among the consequences.
College students spend about $5.5 billion a year on alcohol, more than they spend on books, soft drinks and other beverages combined. Alcohol is a factor in the deaths of about 1,700 college students each year.
The consequences can be particularly severe when people binge drink, a drinking pattern adopted by 44 percent of college students, national surveys have shown. Binge drinking is defined as consuming five or more drinks for men or four or more for women in a row, usually within two hours.
“Most alcohol-related harms experienced by college students occur among drinkers captured by the five/four measure of consumption,” Henry Wechsler of the Harvard School of Public Health and Toben F. Nelson of the University of Minnesota wrote in July in The Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs.
A petition circulating among college presidents seeks to lower the drinking age to 18 on the theory that it would reduce the number of students who binge drink beyond the boundaries of college campuses. But opponents say there is no hard evidence for this belief and a better plan would be to change the drinking culture on campus.
About half of college binge drinkers arrive on campus having engaged in similar behavior in high school; an equal number acquire this behavior in college, Elissa R. Weitzman of Harvard and colleagues reported.
Every year, tens of thousands of college students wind up in emergency rooms suffering from the life-threatening effects of alcohol intoxication. And every year, about a dozen students, including some of the best and brightest and most athletically talented, die from acute alcohol poisoning. In one study of students who suffered alcohol-related injuries, 21 percent reported consuming eight or more drinks in a row.
Although Greek houses, which have the highest rates of binge drinking, are infamous for a free-flowing alcohol culture, studies have found that student athletes and sports fans are also among the heaviest drinkers, often gathering to drink to oblivion after an athletic event.
A Community Approach
A concerted effort has been made in the last decade to define the factors that prompt binge drinking on campuses and devise effective methods to combat it. What has become most obvious to researchers is that colleges cannot achieve this on their own.
“Basically, having programs to reduce binge drinking on college campuses in the absence of broad-based community interventions to do likewise may be a bit like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic,” said Dr. Timothy S. Naimi of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The Harvard School of Public Health College Alcohol Study, which began in 1993, has identified several environmental and community factors that encourage binge drinking. Dr. Wechsler, who directed the study, said in an interview that high-volume alcohol sales, for example, and promotions in bars around campuses encourage drinking to excess.
“Some sell alcohol in large containers, fishbowls and pitchers,” he said. “There are special promotions: women’s nights where the women can drink free; 25-cent beers; two drinks for the price of one; and gut-busters, where people can drink all they want for one price until they have to go to the bathroom. Sites with these kinds of promotions have more binge drinking.
“Price is an issue,” he added. “It can be cheaper to get drunk on the weekend than to go to a movie.”
Although it is a college’s duty to educate students about the effects of alcohol and the risks of drinking too much, “education by itself doesn’t work,” Dr. Wechsler said. “You must attack the supply side as well as the demand side.”
More than half the alcohol outlets surrounding colleges that participated in the Harvard study offered promotions with price discounts, and nearly three-fourths that served alcohol on the premises had price discounts on weekends.
The study found that the sites of heaviest drinking by college students were off-campus bars and parties held off-campus and at fraternity and sorority houses.


Among the factors associated with lower levels of drinking were strong state and local drunken-driving policies aimed at youths and young adults, as well as state alcohol-control policies like keg registration and laws restricting happy hours, open containers in public, beer sold in pitchers and billboards and other types of alcohol advertising.

College sports events should not be sponsored by alcohol purveyors,” Dr. Wechsler said.
Community measures that helped to curtail binge drinking during the eight-year course of the study included a limit on alcohol outlets near campus, mandatory training for beverage servers, a crackdown on unlicensed alcohol sales and greater monitoring of alcohol outlets to curtail under-age drinking and excessive consumption by legal drinkers.
Campus practices that resulted in small but significant reductions in binge drinking included greater supervision of fraternities and sororities and more stringent accreditation requirements for Greek houses, policies to notify parents when students have trouble with alcohol, an increase in substance-free residence halls and more alcohol-free activities like movies and dances, especially on weekend nights.
But, Dr. Wechsler said, “college presidents can’t do it alone. They need help from legislative and community leaders. Alcohol is sold and consumed in the community. Residents need to get together to get it under control.”
What Parents Can Do
Dr. Wechsler urged that parents “put pressure on schools.” They should ask officials at the schools their children attend, or plan to attend, what they are doing to control drinking — especially binge drinking. When visiting schools, parents should check out the quality of life in the dorms. If they detect problems suggestive of heavy drinking, like excessive noise or vomit in the bathrooms, “they should demand that these issues be addressed,” he said.
Of course, he added, “parents should talk to their kids about drinking. Parents shouldn’t think that if it’s a beer and not a drug it’s of no consequence. Beer kills more people than drugs.”
Parents might also make it clear to students that they are expected to perform admirably outside the classroom as well as within it. Studies have shown that there is less drinking by students concerned about their grades, but also by those involved in volunteer work and other activities on and off campus.

K-State Collegian: Don't involve parents

From the KSU Collegian:


With the recent notification that parents will be informed upon a student’s second drug or alcohol violation on campus, there has been a concern that this puts a restriction on our freedom as young adults.K-State officials might feel it is necessary to keep parents involved in various matters of their students’ life at college. What they might fail to realize is that many students here are independent in a sense that they pay for their own college costs, so why do their parents need to be informed of any accidents?Being in college and making mistakes is all a part of growing up and becoming an adult. When we leave college, we need to be able to solely rely on ourselves to make important decisions. Making mistakes in college creates room for improvement and gives us a chance to fix these aspects of our lives before we leave K-State.Another significant concern is that this could create a decrease in the K-State student population. Unfortunately, these are things that might cause students to transfer schools or even avoid coming to K-State. When students are looking for a university, one of the things they look for is freedom. The last thing they want is a repeat of middle or high school where they feel constricted by the bounds and policies of a university.We applaud K-State for trying to decrease underage drinking among students. However, we think we can fight underage drinking in another manner. Maybe creating more of an awareness on campus or a different consequence other than parental notification will be the best solution. However, this new policy will cause students to feel their freedom is being restricted — and this is not the best way to go.

SDSU death

From Signon San Diego on Oct. 5


A 22-year-old student was stabbed to death and three other students were wounded during a street fight early yesterday on the San Diego State University campus.
The Medical Examiner's Office identified the man who was killed as Luis Felipe Watson Dos Santos, a Mesa College student from Concord.

San Diego police homicide Lt. Kevin Rooney said the four victims, all men, had just left a party shortly after 2 a.m. and were walking on 55th Street near Peterson Gym Drive when they began arguing with a second group of four men.
The altercation turned into a fight in the middle of 55th Street, and the four victims were stabbed by a member of the other group, Rooney said. No arests were reported as of late last night.
Santos died at the scene, and the other victims, ages 20 to 24, were taken to hospitals with wounds not believed to be life-threatening, Rooney said. Their conditions were unavailable.

San Diego Community College spokesman Rich Dittbenner said Santos and two of the other victims were Mesa College students. The fourth victim attends SDSU, Dittbenner said.

San Diego State University spokesman Jack Beresford said he did yet know whether the party that the victims attended was at a university residence hall, sorority, fraternity or private residence. SDSU's Fraternity Row is just south of where the fight occurred.

Details of the incident began circulating yesterday among students.

Sophomore Dave Brager, who lives on Hardy Avenue, said his housemates encountered the crime scene on their way home from evening activities.

“They said there were cops everywhere, and they said somebody got stabbed, but then today I heard that one was dead,” Brager said. “I heard it was a murder. It's scary because it's right in my backyard. It's where I walk every day. I think of campus as a safe area. There's not too many thugs around.”

Grant Garske, a student government vice president, said the stabbings were “terrible and tragic.”

“I don't like it when any student gets hurt. I don't like it when any student fights,” Garske said.

Usually students fight over trivial matters, he said, and regret it the next day.

“In this case, I'm sure every one of those students regrets what they did,” Garske said. “Life is clearly more important than a fight.”

Russell Hunter, student president of the Interfraternity Council, said many parties are held in the area.

Campus police have found no fraternity connection to the fight, said Gina Speciale, an SDSU spokeswoman.

Beresford said the university issued a crime alert that was distributed around the campus and posted on the college Web site.

The assault was being described as an isolated incident, but Beresford said students are advised, in general, not to walk alone at night and to program the campus police telephone number into their phones. That number is (619) 594-1991.

Anyone with information is asked to call the San Diego police Homicide Unit at (619) 531-2293 or Crime Stoppers at (888) 580-8477