By Matt Sotlar / The Jambar
Youngstown State University recently received over $92,000 in grant money towards improving campus security.
The grant was supplied by the Department of Public Safety, the Ohio Department of Safety and the Ohio Department of Higher Education. YSU Police Chief Shawn Varso said the funds were a part of a larger grant that was dispersed to various Ohio universities.
“This is a series of grants that have been given out to campuses around the state of Ohio for the last four years or so,” Varso said. “This is the third grant we’ve gotten so far from the state, so it’s basically for security improvements [or] any kind of infrastructure improvements around campus.”
Varso said the ultimate goal of the grant is to install new security features, such as closed-circuit television cameras, across campus.
“It’s to replace and improve the CCTV that we already have in place on the inner core campus and the exterior areas,” Varso said. “Additionally, there is some money for the backend of the equipment.”
Along with new cameras, Varso said parts of the grant will be used to buy storage for the camera footage.
“We’re going to get another disk array out of this grant, which will give us additional storage for CCTV videos and help us get to where our worker’s retention needs to be with it,” Varso said.
In its first year of receiving these grants, YSU was awarded $118,000 for security enhancements. Varso said the grant was used for the improvement of classroom door locks.
“That first grant they received converted a lot of locks that we have in the classrooms around campus to what’s called a ‘store function lock,’” Varso said. “That’s a tool to be used in an active shooter situation, where if we have a lockdown, the door of the classroom is already locked.”
Varso said the university has applied for further grants to help ensure campus safety.
“With this current grant that we applied for, we applied for metal detectors,” Varso said. “Walk through metal detectors, a number of them that we can put in place for special events on campus.”
Varso added that the university will know if the grant application is approved by mid-spring. He also said the installation of metal detectors is a collective effort between campus security and student organizations.
“The one for metal detectors was actually a collaboration between our department, student affairs and student groups around campus,” Varso said. “They gave input on a lot of what they wanted to see improvement wise, and we had made some suggestions, and this grant was tailored specifically for safety and security of campus organizations.”
Other than the additional CCTV cameras, storage and metal detectors, Varso said the police department was looking into grants for the security of the Kilcawley Center renovations.
“We’re not looking at anything major,” Varso said. “When we get into the weeds with the Kilcawley renovations, there’s going to be some improvements that’ll need to be paid for with security for the new renovations of Kilcawley Center. We’ll probably be looking at grants that help offset the costs for that.”