This spring, Campus Safety Services (CSS) will roll out its new Purple Shield initiative, Associate CSS Director and Director of Emergency Management Amalio Jusino wrote in an email to the campus community last Thursday. The program, which aims to standardize emergency preparedness on campus, relies on the national Standard Response Protocol created by the “I Love U Guys” Foundation.
Founded in 2006 by a couple after their daughter was killed in a school shooting, the “I Love U Guys” Foundation partners with schools, organizations, and families to provide emergency response training.
“Our hope is that [the initiative] will become a durable foundation for response and preparedness that will support our students, staff, faculty and visitors for years to come,” Jusino wrote in the email.
Following the 2023 shooting in Lewiston, Maine, after which Bates went into lockdown for two days, Jusino told the Record that he realized the College needed a unified protocol for lockdown, evacuation, and shelter-in-place procedures. Further, potentially life-saving Stop the Bleed courses and publicly available Automatic External Defibrillators, or AEDs, are not currently included in the College’s emergency response plan. Purple Shield will unify all of these disparate resources under one umbrella.
In the fall, Jusino came up with the idea of Purple Shield, a four-month initiative to standardize all types of emergency response on campus. The shooting at Brown last December reinforced the importance of emergency preparedness for Jusino. “I saw, unfortunately, the world criticizing Brown, and it really impacted me to think to myself, ‘I don’t want that to happen here at Williams… Let’s get this done in the next couple of months, and let’s get it on people’s agenda.’”
In the coming weeks, Jusino and other CSS leadership will offer sessions for students to learn basic emergency preparedness, including Stop the Bleed courses, before running the College’s first campus-wide lockdown drill. Before noon on April 15, the entire campus — aside from lab classes — will participate in the 10-minute drill. The exercise will test emergency preparedness in the event of an active shooter on campus.
“One thing that we want to test is, if you’re sitting in a classroom, is anyone looking at their phone?” Jusino said. “If the professor’s teaching, will they even get the message?”
Jusino stressed the importance of students taking both the lockdown and practice sessions seriously.
“If I’m teaching you how to put a tourniquet on because you just got shot — we don’t like the reason, but I don’t want you dying because of that,” Jusino said. “I want you to be able to put the tourniquet on. So we have these talks.”
Ultimately, Jusino aims to help build a well-informed, prepared campus community in the event of an emergency. “I’d much rather tell a parent ‘we did CPR for 40 minutes, and I’m sorry,’ rather than ‘nobody knew what to do. We just stood there,” he said. “No parent wants to hear that.”
