Investigative Journalism Education Consortium (https://ijec.org/category/articles/news-story/page/4/)
Only three of the University of Wisconsin System’s 13 four-year campuses — Platteville, Stevens Point and Parkside — have more than half of students, faculty and staff signed up to receive text alerts, according to a review by the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism.
The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign – where the Northern Illinois shooter, Steven Kazmierczak, lived and attended graduate school at the time of the shooting – has not changed its emergency alert system to reach more students via text messages. With its current opt-in system, however, less than one-third of Illinois’s roughly 42,000 students are signed up for text alerts, Illinois campus security officials say.
The percentages of students who receive emergency notifications via text message reflect the inconsistent and patchwork emergency notification systems that U.S. universities and colleges use. In addition, universities vary on how they keep track of who and how many receive these alerts.
A spot check of universities across the Midwest and around the nation has revealed that four-year institutions are inconsistent in their approach to sending out emergency alerts to students and staff. Although universities automatically send out emergency notifications via school email addresses, they vary on their policies and success for text alerts.
The Investigative Journalism Education Consortium was named a finalist this week in a national award honoring outstanding student investigative journalism projects in 2012.
The transition for mentally ill inmates from the Champaign County jail to community services is seriously hampered by a lack of coordination and communication between the jail officials and local mental health providers, according to a top county mental health official and a jail consultant hired by the county.
In the wake of Sandy Hook and other school shootings of recent years, gun control advocates – and some politicians, including President Obama – have renewed a push for changes to existing gun laws.
Yet others say that mental health services, rather than gun reform, should be the focus
In the aftermath of the April 2007 shooting at Virginia Tech, which left 33 people dead and 25 others wounded, Missouri’s Department of Homeland Security compiled a list of recommendations for universities to follow in order to decrease the likelihood of a similar attack occurring on a Missouri college campus.
Among the most important recommendations were calls for a higher percentage of counselors per student and for mental health counseling to be provided for students 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
More college students are arriving on campus reporting serious mental health problems and more students are threatening suicide than in the past. But some college counseling services, such as those at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, are so understaffed that many students have to wait weeks before getting help.
A decade ago, Thomas Murphy was a college dropout who used alcohol and drugs to deal with undiagnosed depression. Now he’s back at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he co-leads a chapter of Active Minds, a national, student-run group promoting open conversations about mental illness. Therapy made the difference for Murphy. But he can’t receive it at school. When he re-enrolled at UW-Madison and went to the counseling center, he walked out with no appointment and a list of referrals.