Making Campus Safer for College Students
For students matriculating to colleges and universities across Arizona and the nation, campus life marks a period of great opportunity and, unfortunately, unique risk.

February 13, 2009 /24-7PressRelease/ -- Making Campus Safer for College Students

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For students matriculating to colleges and universities across Arizona and the nation, campus life marks a period of great opportunity and, unfortunately, unique risk. Many of them away from home for the first time, students on college campuses must adjust to life away from the shelter of their parents' homes. Too many do not recognize the precautions necessary to avoid becoming the victim of campus crimes.

Understanding the need for enhanced measures to protect college students, almost twenty years ago the federal government enacted the Campus Security Act. As we approach the twentieth anniversary of this law designed to protect our college students, it is appropriate to take a look at the measures that have been taken to make campuses a safe place for students to learn and grow.

The Jeanne Clery Act
The problem of violence against campus students is not new. In 1986, Jeanne Clery, a freshman at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, was raped and murdered in her residence hall. After her death, her parents discovered that there had been at least 38 other violent crimes on the university's campus in the three years prior -- a fact which had never been made public to the students or their families. Hoping to prevent future crimes against other college students, the Clerys joined with other campus crime victims to persuade the US Congress to enact the Crime Awareness and Campus Security Act of 1990.

Known widely as the Jeanne Clery Act, this law requires colleges and universities to make public information about crimes that occur on and around their campuses. Since Congress tied the Act to participation in federal student financial aid programs, its requirements extend to all colleges and universities, public and private.
Specifically, the Clery Act requires schools to compile and disclose statistics related to all reported crimes on or around campus. A crime is considered to have been "reported" when it is brought to the attention of a campus security authority or the local police -- it does not matter who actually makes the report. The crimes do not have to have been investigated; the allegation alone is enough to meet the reporting threshold.

Amendments to the Clery Act
Beginning almost immediately after its inception, Congress has updated the Clery Act several times, aiming to provide greater protection for college students. One early challenge faced by Congress was the conflict between the Clery Act and the 1974 Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA). Often referred to as the Buckley Amendment, FERPA was passed to protect students' privacy rights, so only they and their families could see their educational records. Unfortunately, some colleges and universities considered campus crime records as educational records, denying public access to both.

In a lawsuit brought in federal court to bring clarity to the issue, a federal judge ruled that extending the Buckley Amendment to cover campus crime records was unconstitutional. This ruling, however, only served to bring notice to the situation, causing universities and colleges to take a second look at their policy on release of campus crime reports.

Fearing that failure to comply with the Buckley Amendment would cause them to lose their federal funding, a number of schools changed their policies, releasing less information to the public. Arizona State University, for example, halted their practice of releasing crime reports unedited under Arizona's open records statute, instead releasing "sanitized" reports, in which identifying information was redacted before the reports were released. Congress acted by amending the Clery Act with the Higher Education Amendments of 1998. Among other things, this amendment stated that colleges and universities could not use the Buckley Amendment as an excuse to avoid the Clery Act requirements.

Other amendments made to the Clery Act include passage of the Campus Sexual Assault Victims Bill of Rights, which required schools to develop and publish policies regarding the prevention of sex offenses. Under this amendment, colleges and universities must provide students with clear information about how to report sex offenses and about the medical, legal and psychological assistance available to victims. In 2000, the law was amended to require that schools notify the campus community about where public "Megan's Law" information about registered sex offenders could be obtained.

Most recently, just last year then-President George W. Bush signed into law seven amendments to the Clery Act as a part of the College Opportunity and Affordability Act of 2008. Responding to the tragic shootings at Virginia Tech in 2007, these latest amendments require schools to install procedures to alert students, faculty and staff immediately when an emergency occurs on campus. While this is the latest effort by Congress to enhance the safety initiatives for college students first began almost 20 years ago, it almost certainly won't be the last.

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