Housing and Food Services has begun a training program to educate employees on how to respond if there is an active shooter in their work place, one that could soon spread to the rest of campus.
Housing and Food Services employees comprise the largest group of workers on campus, including all cafeteria staff and maintenance workers, as well as other full- and part-time staff.
“We’ve made the training mandatory for every employee,” said Denise Zieleniewski, human resources manager for Housing and Food Services. “That includes full-time, part-time, on-call and student employees.”
About 2,500 employees have completed the training so far.
MSU police Sgt. Matt Merony, who is in charge of the program, said he hopes to have 5,000 people trained by the end of the school year. Merony said police eventually will offer the training to all university departments.
Christina Swick, the emergency team leader for the Eli Broad College of Business, MSU’s largest academic college, said the department would be interested in participating in the training and is planning a similar program for later this year.
“We’ve had some requests from people in the building interested in what we can do to be prepared,” Swick said.
The training focuses on “mental rehearsals,” a concept police regularly use, Merony said. It presents employees with hypothetical emergency situations and prompts them to ask themselves what they would do if the situation became a reality.
“It gives them things to think about so hopefully they don’t freeze up and just do nothing,” Merony said. “It’s building a survival mind-set.”
Zieleniewski said the decision to conduct training started during a meeting with MSU police a few months ago to raise staff awareness about shooting situations similar to Virginia Tech one year ago.
“We met with the intention of creating some kind of communication document regarding when to report, when to be concerned,” she said.
After the meeting, Zieleniewski said police showed her the video used in the training program and her department decided to get involved.
Although the program is only mandatory for Housing and Food Services staff, Zieleniewski said many residence hall night receptionists and mentors have attended sessions.
She said her goal for the program is for employees to be prepared if an active shooter situation arises on campus.
“It’s the world we live in today,” she said.
“These kind of things can happen anywhere, anytime, any place and what we can do is be aware of signs to look for and prepare ourselves mentally for if something like this happened.”
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