Asia Duren

Editor

A campus wide lockdown drill took place at the W on Tuesday, Nov. 24.

An email W-alert stating that the drill was beginning was sent to student, faculty and staff emails at 1:57 p.m. However, the text message W-alert did not go out until 2:03 p.m.

Students, faculty and staff had been preparing for the drill for weeks leading up to it. One student, Brittney Jefferson, a junior healthcare management major, found herself alone in Martin Hall during the lockdown.

“My advisor had just gone to a meeting, so I was the only one in there so I had to lock all of the doors and like go to my safe spot and turn off all the lights and sit there and I didn’t do it quick enough so the police officer came over and said, ‘Yeah, lock all of the doors,’ so that wasn’t so good,” said Jefferson. “But she had drilled it in our heads, what to do, in case we were alone, so I kind of knew what to do, but now that I went through the actual actions of it, I know better now. I’m more confident in doing it and I know how to lock the door now because it’s actually kind of hard.”

Billy Simmons, International Student Services coordinator, was not on campus at the time of the lockdown, but he said that he felt the communication was good on campus.

“They were well trained, and I think moving forward if we ever had to execute this type of drill, if the situation was really occurring, you know, I’m very confident that the Cochran Hall staff would show up and perform as well as they did for the drill,” said Simmons.

Nikikke Wallace-Johnson, assistant director of housing services, also felt like the drill was well executed.

“As far as our lockdown drill that we had where we involved our students, I feel like it went really well. Students were still on our floor and coming into the building, so I was able to get them to come into my office and we talked about what would really happen if this was not a drill,” said Wallace-Johnson.

With the exception of a few minor glitches, it seems the drill was quite successful.