Green River College Fails To Comply With Clery Act Standards

Green River College officials will not fight the Department of Education’s findings that they violated a federal campus crime-reporting act for six consecutive years. 

The Clery Act mandates the reporting of crime and fire statistics on campuses. Colleges must follow these guidelines in order to receive Title IV funding.  GRC, in funding, received $13 million for the school year of 2015 and 2016.

In Nov of 2015, auditors from the Department of Education (DOE) arrived on campus to review data and policies concerning the Clery Act and the DFSCA. In their review, they found that from 2008 to 2014, the college failed in 13 areas of these acts and, in result, could face fines for the large number of violations.

A preliminary report from the DOE outlining the findings was sent to the college on Sept 28, 2017.

President Suzanne M. Johnson, upon receiving this report and reviewing the findings, decided to summarize the initial 68 page review and bring it to the attention of the college and student body before the DOE. “One of the things I shared with the college before I was even a candidate for the presidency was the need to be transparent and the need to be very forthright,” Johnson said.

“When I learned that we were not going to contest, that yes, we were concurring, I said ‘Let’s move forward now.’”

The DOE evidenced a lack of administrative capability, claiming that the college failed to integrate an adequate internal system that understood Clery and DFSCA guidelines.  “The overall compliance program evidenced a lack of supervisory oversight, and affected personnel were largely unaware of their obligations to ensure substantive compliance with the Clery Act and DFSCA,” The report states.

“Safety and security is a unit of our college that reports to the Vice President for Student Affairs. Within there we have Derek [Ronnfeldt], who is our director of HR. Certainly they are point people for the ultimate oversight and compliance aspects [of Clery policies],” Johnson said. “Yes, there are specific point people and that would be Deb Casey and Derek Ronnfeldt, but the safety and security of our campus is all of our responsibility, too.”  

In response to the findings of the review, the college has hired a new Assistant Director of Campus Safety, Martin Viney, who has background in working with Clery policies.

Mentioned in Johnson’s message to the college and student body, the college has begun using new software and technology for classifying and tracking crimes on their computers. Before, the program would classify crimes such as sexual assault as just assault, forcible fondling as harassment, burglaries as theft, and aggravated assaults as informational or an altercation (specific examples are available in the report on exhibit B).

This software also made way for the discrepancy in ‘Clery Geography’, which states where a crime happens pertaining to the campus. When reporting a crime, Safety and Security must choose an option for where the crime took place and the software that the college had been using prior to the review did not provide an option for public property, instead just referencing the crime as ‘off campus.’

From 2008 to 2013, the college failed to produce and distribute both Annual Security (ASR) and Annual Fire Safety (AFSR) reports. ASR and AFSR’s that are distributed to students, generally contain the statistics for the crimes and fires that happened each year. Along with this, the college failed to keep both an accurate crime and fire log.

The college also failed to implement programs to prevent drug and alcohol abuse and bring awareness to sexual assault on campus. According to the report, colleges must have a policy that contains a statement about the institution’s standards that prohibit unlawful use of drugs and alcohol by students and employees, a description of legal sanctions, give health risks associated with drug and alcohol abuse, describe programs that are available to students and employees regarding treatment, and outline any disciplinary sanctions on students and employees.

It is possible that the college could face fines of $35,000 per violation. However, the college will not know if it will be facing fines until after their response is received. The processing of this response by the DOE could take 60 days or longer.

The money, if needed, will come from a contingency fund that the college has in case of an emergency or situations such as this. “We do have contingency monies that we always mark for situations that occur, this being an example,” Johnson said.

The college is not alone in its fight to understand and properly follow the Clery Act and the DFSCA.  “I wouldn’t say that all schools necessarily have these kinds of challenges,” Johnson said. “Some of the things I’ve seen in the report, I’ve seen at other institutions,” Johnson said. “I don’t consider Green River unique in any particular way with this.”

The college has 60 days to respond to the findings made by the DOE and has already begun the process of correcting the failures found within the report.

Among these corrections are eight new policies and three existing ones that have been revised. Included in these policies are: SA-31, Reporting Crimes and Other Emergencies, which outlines what crimes to report and who to report them to; SA-28, the Preparation of Disclosure of Crime Statistics including Fire Statistics for Residential Students, requiring the college to report crime and fire statistics of the last three calendar years to students, and many others (SA-27, 29, 30, 92, 93, and GA-1) available on the college’s website.