Students, staff express concerns following Laurentian’s shelter-in-place in January

A false report of an active shooter Jan. 27 at Laurentian University showed the flaws in the way the school responds to emergencies.

In the wake of a false threat last month at Laurentian University in Sudbury, some students and staff are calling for changes to the way the school responds to such threats.

Initial reports of an active shooter on campus proved to be false, but the threat was very real to students in classes the morning of Jan. 27.

Milena Raso, a fourth-year concurrent education student, said they couldn’t even lock the classroom door when the shelter-in-place email was sent that morning.

“I get a text message on my phone from one of my friends in our group chat, and she says that her professor has everyone hiding under desks,” Raso said.

“Her professor said shelter in place meant active gunman.”

Raso’s professor hadn’t received the email, but quickly realized they couldn’t lock the door or move the desks to block the entrance because the desks were bolted to the floor.

“We just sat in our seats in complete silence until it was lifted,” she said.

“We were kind of just going based (on) what everyone else was saying. Of course, there was no actual gunman, but we were hearing that he was right outside of my classroom.”

Lots of feedback

Raso said she emailed the university about her concerns, but has not yet received a response.

LU president Lynn Wells said a working group is reviewing the great deal of feedback that the administration has received since the incident.

The good news, Wells said, was that it was a false alarm and no one was hurt.

“Certainly (it was) a frightening event,” she said.

“But our team responded very well to address it. Since that time, we have asked for feedback from the community -- we’ve received a great deal of feedback.”

Among those giving feedback is Tom Fenske, president of Laurentian’s staff union (LUSU).

“Some of our biggest concerns revolved around communications, timing and flow of traffic through the university,” Fenske said in a statement.

“We also wanted to better understand why transit, for instance, continued to flow through our campus during this event. LUSU believes that our security team worked incredibly well with local authorities to sweep the campus in order to assess any threat.”

The union met with administrators 10 days after the incident, he added, and “there was a commitment to continue to update us on changes that will be made to better secure all community members, should any incident take place in the future.”

Wells said there is continuous improvement in learning to respond to emergency events and that the university has good procedures in place.

But, she added, you learn from every incident and that you take that opportunity to make sure the processes and training are always improving going into the future.