Safe Campus Recognized by Clery
8/20/07
Maryville University has earned a national Jeanne Clery Campus Safety Award from Security on Campus for its leadership in being one of six universities nationwide to host a two-day seminar that offered training on proper compliance with the Jeanne Clery Disclosure of Campus Security Policy and Campus Crime Statistics Act. Maryville University is known for having one of the safest campuses in the country.
“We are very grateful to the six universities which stepped up on short notice to offer their facilities and their staff’s time so we could offer these seminars, ” said Catherine Bath, executive director of Security on Campus. Maryville hosted more than 120 regional and national campus law enforcement administrators from across the country in late July.
“We are proud to have hosted this seminar on the vital topic of compliance with the Clery Act,” said Mike Parkinson, director of public safety at Maryville University. “For many in attendance, it was a refresher course. Others learned the information for the first time. Regardless, this seminar was a timely reminder to all who work in higher education of the importance of providing students, parents and the general public with complete, timely and accurate details on campus crime incidents.”
Passed by Congress in 1998, the Clery Act requires colleges and universities to disclose crime statistics for certain off-campus areas, and requires that schools with a security department must maintain a daily crime log. The law bears the name of Jeanne Clery, who was a freshman at Lehigh University when she was beaten, raped and murdered by an intruder in her dormitory room on April 5, 1986. Her assailant was another Lehigh student whom Clery did not know.
In response to their daughter’s murder, Connie and Howard Clery founded Security on Campus, whose mission is to prevent violence, substance abuse and other crimes in college and university campus communities across the United States, and to compassionately assist the victims of these crimes. Security on Campus is sponsoring training seminars like the one at Maryville University with the help of a grant from the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office for Victims of Crime Grant.
In the photo: Maryville University President Mark Lombardi, Ph.D., center, and Mike Parkinson, director of public safety, right, receive the Jeanne Clery Campus Safety Award from Catherine Bath, executive director of Security on Campus.