can anyone link me to info on how other schools would have handled the Cho situation?

Parents Forum
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<p>before it got out of hand that is..</p>

<p>I hesitate to bring this subject up, and don't want to offend anyone or the memories of the students and teachers who were lost at V Tech, but I am very interested in this subject, especially the legal aspects.</p>

<p>How do other campuses handle this sort of situation, ie if a student is stalking other students, had to be removed from a class because he/she was intimidating other students, or was adjuducated to be mentally ill/danger to self/others?</p>

<p>Also, does anyone know of campuses with especially good emergency preparedness, ie that would have an effective system in place to proactively deal with a situation such as a shooter on campus?</p>

<p>Lastly, I am interested to know if anyone thinks VTech has significant legal liability for what occurred, due to not suspending/expelling Cho and/or not responding more effectively after the first shootings took place.</p>

<p>I am just an interested parent of a college student, not looking for fault-finding per se but just a constructive discussion.</p>

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<p>bummmpppppp</p>

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<p>Were you expecting to get a lot of responses between 1 and 2 in the morning? Heh. =). Sorry I can't help, though.</p>

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<p>sorry, I just travelled cross 3 time zones twice within 2 days and I was wide awake at 3 am.. ;)</p>

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<p>Both of my kids attend private LACs and state that classmates have been suspended or expelled for far less than CHO's alleged stalking and violent prose. I assume private LACs can more easily remove problem students than a public school like VT?</p>

<p>Of course, suspension or expulsion might not have stopped Cho's violence. But, perhaps the school could have required counseling before he returned or for him to remain on campus.</p>

<p>I was uncomfortable that Cho's roommates were not better supported/protected. If teachers were so fearful of Cho that he was not allowed in some classes and the staff used special code words if they felt threatened - was there not some role for discussion with his roommates?</p>

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<p>I agree with you. Cho's roomates were placed in a situation of grave risk.</p>

<p>You raise a good question regarding if a private school has more leeway than a public to intervene...but I don't think this is always the case, as I read that U VA (also public and obviously operating under the same state laws as VTEch), has measures in place such as you describe at private LACs:</p>

<p>from article "Congress looking at ways to improve campus security", by Pamela Brogan, Gannett News Service:</p>

<p>"Russ Federman, director of counseling and
psychological services at the University of Virginia's
Department of Student Health, told Congress recently
that students considered potentially dangerous should
be evaluated.</p>

<p>He said UVA's dean of students has the authority to
suspend students and require psychological testing
before they return to school if they exhibit dangerous
behavior and refuse mental health services.</p>

<p>"This is not something that is uniformly done across
campuses," Federman told the Senate Committee on
Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. "</p>

<p>The key point being that the dean of students at U VA has authority to suspend students like Cho.</p>

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<p>Uva has had a number of student murderers over the years.</p>

<p><a href="http://www.cvillenews.com/2003/11/09/student-charged-with-murder/%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.cvillenews.com/2003/11/09/student-charged-with-murder/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

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<p>Notre Dame has a strict code of conduct that you can access at its website nd.edu thru office of residence life and housing. As I have not read every word, I cannot honestly comment on how ND would have handled the Cho situation. I do know however, that students have been suspended for alcohol and drug related offenses. And, I assume that it has a lot to do with ND being a private school. Of course, it is also against Indiana law as well. Given that there are already pretty strict policies in place for just about any offense, I would speculate that a student such as Cho would be suspended and or expelled. However, you can read the code of conduct at the ND site. I also know that ND has carefully been reevaluating its safety and security since last year, as indicated in a letter from the president shortly after the VA Tech incident. I imagine ND as well as many other colleges and unis are very carefullly crafting codes to be put in place should another incident arise like Cho.</p>

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<p>Univ. of Missouri - Rolla had an incident with a threatening student earlier this year; All classes were cancelled that day. </p>

<p><a href="http://news.umr.edu/news/2007/BCthreatupdate.html%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://news.umr.edu/news/2007/BCthreatupdate.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

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<p>On the other hand, a non-student came onto the Kenyon College campus recently (post V-Tech), fought with his girlfriend, threatened to burn down her dorm, and return with a machine gun, and was asked to leave campus by campus police. My understanding is he is being charged with a misdemeanor. The local sheriff's office was not notified until 5 hours after the incident. By that time he had left the state of Ohio, and returned to Indiana.
My nephew who goes to school there is still fearful, and in fact has been sleeping away from his dorm since then. The school administration has still not sent any form of communication to parents about it either. It was handled poorly.</p>

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<p>barrons- I checked the link, it references 3 murders, the most recent in 2003; but they are not at all similar to the Cho situation</p>

<p>good point about the campus code of conduct being used as a vehicle to suspend or expel someone like Cho..I guess the victims of his stalking and intimidation in the poetry class didn't press charges, so maybe there was no way to implicate him in violating code of conduct?</p>

<p>Does anyone know V Tech's code of conduct and why it didn't come into play with Cho back in 2005 when he was sent for the psych eval after the stalking?</p>

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<p>The original question is a bit like trying to prove a negative. We could cite the way things are supposed to work at other schools, and perhaps even the way things did work in other situations, but unless these schools have had a Cho, it's presumptuous to say that those efforts would have necessarily worked.</p>

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<p>I see what you're saying..basically I'm just looking for info like what I posted about U VA..are there other schools that take a more proactive approach in suspension/expelling students that are clearly dangerous, like Cho, or have violated the campus conduct code?</p>

<p>and also info about other schools that at least have an emergency notification system that theoretically would have worked better in a situation like this (ie to lock down/ notify others on campus immediately after the first shooting) and maybe some documented instances of same (like the U Missouri example above...)</p>

<p>are there any "poster children" out there among campuses that have all this dialed in?</p>

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<p>
[quote]
I agree with you. Cho's roomates were placed in a situation of grave risk.

[/quote]
</p>

<p>In theory, maybe. In reality, he was with them that day, and he had plenty of opportunities to kill them or anyone else he knew, but he didn't. He only killed strangers. Basically, he seems to have taken steps to make sure he only killed people he'd maybe never even seen. Why else would he would walk to another dorm when he was already in his own? Why else would he walk all the way across campus, a very significant walk, to an engineering building? At a time when he didn't have classes. He was an English major. He didn't go to an English class. </p>

<p>In fact it seems the safest people in reality that day were people Cho knew. This seems consistent with the "profile." Someone who committed a similar crime was talking on the news somewhere, I don't remember, but they were taken down before shooting themself. They talked about detachment from the crime...about using a gun from a distance, about shooting people they didn't know, as opposed to say, their family. Now if Cho had been a different kind of criminal, then certainly his roommates would have been at risk. But as it stands, oddly, they really weren't. </p>

<p>I'm sure a lot of university presidents will come out and say, well we would have done this. But in reality, there are a lot of privacy laws that prevent institutions, inside and outside of campuses, from fully working together nowadays, and from fully identifying at risk individuals. What we have to ask ourselves is, would UVA have been very different from Tech? I am in Va, and know countless people at both, including very close friends and relatives. My personal opinion to that question is no. We must weed out the "marketing" here, so to speak. Of course they are going to say they would have prevented this, parents all over Va know kids at these schools and they are shaken. They want to hear that it only happened because Tech was somehow inferior. I do not think this is the truth. I think a lot of places have holes. Tech was massively unlucky, as they got someone with the potential to commit this kind of crime. Obviously, mental illness comes in many varieties but still is an incredibly small percentage with the potential to do this, or we'd obviously have many more tragedies. That does NOT mean that potential should be ignored, IMO, as you never knew, you may just have that ONE person on your hands. But I do think that we have problems with this in many schools across the US, high schools and universities. Tech is obviously going to revamp their system. I would be highly surprised if UVA does not make changes as well now, whether they will admit them is another story, probably not. Schools all over Va, and all over the nation, had a wake up call. But that doesn't mean beforehand that they expected this to happen.</p>

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<p>you make an interesting point Princedog...maybe this is why efforts to find a motive or connection between Cho and his victims have been unsuccessful...</p>

<p>I also agree that Tech was massively unlucky...and this isn't about blaming them per se; just looking to answer the question of how could this have been prevented? What are other schools doing right, that given a Cho-like situation, would have short-circuited tragedy?</p>

<p>marketing or not, if I had a student at U VA I would be very happy to hear that they at least have the authority to suspend dangerous students; this seems to me to be a crucial element in preventing future tragedies of this nature.</p>

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<p>Since two accepted students days followed the VT incident, we got at least two responses. I can't say I was terribly reassured by either. Harvard's presentation had more time - they basically said that they felt there were enough advisers in the system that would notice a problem. That they would suspend a kid who appeared to be having serious problems. And they would notify House masters, dorm proctors etc. in case something like a lock-down was deemed necessary.</p>

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<p>
[quote]
marketing or not, if I had a student at U VA I would be very happy to hear that they at least have the authority to suspend dangerous students; this seems to me to be a crucial element in preventing future tragedies of this nature.

[/quote]
</p>

<p>I find the fact that people now think UVA is safer than Tech funny. Before this, that statement would have been laughable. I'm not trying to cut anyone down, I'm just saying - you're comparing Charlottesville to Blacksburg, which before this year had ZERO murders. Whatever authority UVA has over students, they've come under a lot of questioning about their crime rates, particularly in regards to sexual assault numbers. </p>

<p>I'm NOT saying that UVA is unsafe. I'm just saying. The weekend before April 16th, we were at Days on the Lawn too, parents remarking how they liked Tech because it's safe. Ironic now, but the point is, UVA never has been and probably isn't now, safer than Tech. With proper precautions, it isn't any more unsafe than lots of places, but UVA has come under a lot of fire too, for some high profile murders and other crimes. I find it ironic now that people are going to try and paint UVA as the anti-Tech. I think if Cho had gone there, we'd have about the same potential to still be facing this situation, I fear. </p>

<p>I would say Tech is not really in a comparable position with Harvard. Size wise, they aren't even in the same ballpark, not to mention other serious demographic differences. </p>

<p>Lock downs are useful for outside intruders, but really, let's face it. The shooter lived on campus. So they go into lockdown. He goes back into his dorm and waits it out like everyone else. They don't find anyone, or they keep questioning Emily Hilscher's boyfriend, convinced it's him. They couldn't stay locked down forever. Or Cho would have just been absorbed into a roomful of kids who were out on the drillfield - he could open fire in that room, with possibly even more disastrous consequences. He could just open fire in the midst of chaos as people scrambled around the drillfield. Lockdown procedures are important in the case of outside intruders, but the implications for a lockdown at the huge university level are very different than for the high school level where teachers know everyone in the room and can account for their whereabouts in the time leading up to the lockdown. I think if you want to prevent what happened at Tech, you're going to have stop things long before the events of the day are set in motion. By the time he had guns and planned to kill people, I don't think a lockdown was going to be able to stop him when he was a student with a legitimate ID. I don't agree with the pessimists who say "you're never going to stop someone from killing", but I don't think that extended to the day itself - you never expect something like this to happen, and he was a student. He belonged on that campus. He would have just locked down with the rest of them. I feel like people just want a false sense of security and that could prevent real changes from being made.</p>

<p>By this I mean we should not accept university presidents saying, oh yeah, we would have prevented it. Do we think they will say, "hmm wow we would have had a massacre here too! Sorry we aren't protecting your kids, hope you don't like them too much". Of course not. Instead people should recognize that many schools have problems - it wasn't like Tech was some free for all school, they had regulations too. It obviously failed. Real change needs to be demanded, not just accepted from the pacification of individuals in not just any time, but in the exact critical two week period before May 1st, as they scramble for their "yield." Of course they are going to say whatever you want to hear.</p>

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<p>
[quote]
On the other hand, a non-student came onto the Kenyon College campus recently (post V-Tech), fought with his girlfriend, threatened to burn down her dorm, and return with a machine gun, and was asked to leave campus by campus police. My understanding is he is being charged with a misdemeanor. The local sheriff's office was not notified until 5 hours after the incident. By that time he had left the state of Ohio, and returned to Indiana.
My nephew who goes to school there is still fearful, and in fact has been sleeping away from his dorm since then. The school administration has still not sent any form of communication to parents about it either. It was handled poorly.

[/quote]
</p>

<p>I just want to say that the person did NOT came back with a machine gun. Campus security did search for weapons but find that he was unarmed. And security does not have the authority to make arrest.</p>

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<p>we have multiple connections to current students at Tech. I am a psychiatric social worker by training. I question how random 19 year olds were unwittingly placed in dorm rooms as the roommate of a friendless 23 year old in the first place. my nephew was in West Ambler Johnson and neighbor's' daughters were only steps from where Emily and Ryan were shot first. we have a local school where three students lost their parents. my nephew lost three of his favorite teachers, wonderful people. If you recall, Tech was already considering buying into Text messaging warning services. I think you will see many colleges doing this promptly. From what I see with my son's phone bill, text messaging is the mode of communication that would most likely have covered thousands of younger adults quickly. when my nephew went to his B/R for a shower on April 16, two students were dead in his building but the only formal notification he had was a sign put up by an RA on the B/R door that said, "First floor Ambler is closed". Please keep in mind that the first two victims were on the fourth floor and had been dead for over an hour by then. Not a word about "shooter on the loose." He was able to see ambulances out a window and there was speculation going around that was partially true, but nephew like many others prepared to leave for his next late morning class.<br>
We are still deeply traumatized and in shock down here in the Blue Ridge region where so many families believed their young ones could escape urban sprawl and be safe while being educated here.
I will say that I have been in this region more than a decade. And I have often been struck with how little serious mental illness like schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders are understood around here. Granted the local churches do keep the homeless overnight and provide meals and outings to many who are deinstitutionalized and lonely. I know this inability to comprehend mental illness is true all over the world, and I used to work for the Mental Health Association in a large city, but still, there is something kind of naive or innocent in SW VA and when serious mental illness has been evident a few times in the last decade in my circles, people have under-reacted. It is a normal response to want to withdraw from the presence of a psychotic person, and at a gut level, many adults and older teens realized he was possibly severely impaired. But few understand the onset of severe mental illness or the names of these illnesses.<br>
I will not go so far as to say many people who were nervous around him imagined he was capable of mass murder or planning and carrying out such a massive crime. But many people I believe we will learn during the coming investigation realized he was more than "troubled" or "shy".
When 19 year old boys are calling the cops to report odd behavior in a roommate, something very deviant is going down because boys don't casually rat out other boys in dorms as freshmen. When your roommate won't let you in the room because "Jelly is visiting" that is called Psychotic Thought Disorder, not just a fantasy. But the students were very kind and bewildered, and did not complain. They simply came back to the room later. I don't think kids fresh out of high school understand that line between weird roommate with a big fantasy life and no social skills and roommate who may be displaying severe psychosis or the onset of a major mental illness.<br>
When two storied and respected English professors are making reports right and left and are both fearful and intimidated, something serious is happening.<br>
We will have to learn more later about whether the screeners in his overnight stay in the hospital had access to the multiplie complaints about this student in academia and in the dorm world. Somehow I like to think that if the people at St. Albans had a full record of his aberrent behaviors on file, they might have taken a different course of action and his name might have at least been in the gun registry No file.
As an adult who came of age during the "deinstitutionalization" era when severely mentally ill adults were turned out of the large state hospitals and turned over to the Feds via Medicaid and SSI payments and then charged with managing their own care in woefully zero safety net "community settings" with fractured brains, I wonder if we have all learned to turn away from the seriously thought disordered who we do see often on the streets.
Anyway, I am confidant that Tech will fully cooperate and those charged with researching all preceding events will give us the details. I am impressed with the grieving Hoakie nation and how they have dealt with the aftermath so far.</p>

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<p>Thank you Faline for taking the time and effort for that post. That's the most insightful and honest thing I've read about this tragedy. My heart goes out to all of you so personally and deeply affected by this.</p>