Safebolt Lock The Xavierite
With the start of this semester, SXU has implemented new SAFEBOLT locks on each of the classroom doors in the Warde Academic Center (WAC). The main purpose of these locks is to protect SXU students, faculty, and staff from potential harm.
“[The locks are] very much needed in order to keep students safe,” one member of the board asserts. “It is always in the air that something could happen to the students and faculty on campus.”
“The locks keep us safe just in case,” a member noted. “If anything, students should be more scared without the locks than with them.”
“It is very easy for someone to walk into a building,” another member added, noting how easy it is for students to be put at risk. “People use their manners, holding the door open for one another. Unless they know the person, it could potentially be an intruder.”
According to a study conducted by the American College of Surgeons, the number of active shooter incidents increased from 20 in 1970 to 251 in 2021. With this massive skyrocket, many schools across the country are moving to ensure the safety of their students, many implementing locks like the ones from SAFEBOLT.
While most would agree that these locks do add a degree of security to schooling environments, some would argue that measures like this only serve as a reminder to students of the violence occurring within our country and across the globe, and do more to distract from learning than to protect the learners themselves.
While we certainly acknowledge this as a real truth of many safety measures implemented in schools in recent years, overall the board agreed that they still need to be put in place as these are still real issues that we as a collective must deal with.
“There’s two things that all life has in common: birth and death,” a member stated in defense of the new safety locks. “It is human to fear the idea, but it is up to one to remember that it can occur at anytime anywhere.”
Despite the locks being arguably needed, the editorial board overall seems to agree that SXU has never felt like a place where students, faculty, or staff would have to worry about an instance where the locks would need to be utilized.
“I walk around campus at night or in the dark all the time to get things like food,” one member noted, exemplifying the feeling of safety on campus. “It has never felt unsafe.”
While campus has overall been a safe place for students, there is always a risk that something can happen at any time, at any place. “Safety is always an overall concern for me on campus,” one member said. “You never know who could slip through a door and try to hurt students.”
In addition to the SAFEBOLT locks, the editorial board also offered up a few alternative options that could potentially aid in keeping SXU a safe environment.
“Public safety should have people inside each dorm building at night,” one member suggested, “in the event that something happens there that they need to quickly get to.”
Along with the implementation of stronger safety measures, students also need to be sure not to do things like letting people they aren’t familiar with into the school, and just to have good situational awareness as a whole. “Students need to be aware of their surroundings,” one member noted.
Overall, the editorial board feels that in the event of an emergency where the school’s classrooms would need to be on lockdown, SXU is fully prepared to handle the situation to ensure the safety of everyone at the university to the best of its ability.