Who doesn’t need a free, time-saving tool? RAPID, a new free resource for higher education colleagues is designed to rapidly train key staff, using a program customized to the institution. Join guest host Julie Groves of Wake Forest as she talks with contributing staff members from The State University of New York about this new tool. Guests are Joe Storch, associate counsel in the SUNY Office of General Counsel and chair of the Student Affairs Practice Group, Abbey Marr, assistant director of the SUNY Student Conduct Institute, and Roma Shah, staff associate for SUNY's Got Your Back.
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Who doesn’t need a free, time-saving tool? RAPID, a new free resource for higher education colleagues is designed to rapidly train key staff, using a program customized to the institution. Join guest host Julie Groves of Wake Forest as she talks with contributing staff members from The State University of New York about this new tool. Guests are Joe Storch, associate counsel in the SUNY Office of General Counsel and chair of the Student Affairs Practice Group, Abbey Marr, assistant director of the SUNY Student Conduct Institute, and Roma Shah, staff associate for SUNY's Got Your Back.
Show Notes [member login required]
Connect with URMIA & URMIA with your network
-Share /Tag in Social Media @urmianetwork
-Not a member? Join ->www.urmia.org/join
-Email | contactus@urmia.org
Give URMIA Matters a boost:
-Give the podcast a 5 star rating
-Share the podcast - click that button!
-Follow on your podcast platform - don't miss an episode!
Thanks for listening to URMIA Matters!
Julie: Hi everyone! I’m thrilled to be your guest host on URMIAmatters today. I’m Julie Groves from Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem North Carolina and with me today are Joe Storch, Abbey Marr and Roma Shah from the Student Conduct Institute housed at the State University of New York. Welcome, everybody! Today we’re going to be talking about RAPID, which is a free customizable and high-quality training designed for colleges and universities to quickly, efficiently and accurately train responsible authorities under the Clery Act, Title IX and other campus policies. Joe, would you mind introducing yourself and your team to the listeners?
Joe: Thanks, Julie, it’s so great to be with you and so great to see my friend Jenny, of many years, on this podcast. Glad to be back on URMIAmatters. I’m Joe Storch, I’m an attorney at the SUNY Office of General Counsel. I also serve as principal investigator for a number of programs we have here at the State University of New York that address the prevention of and response to violence on campuses and in the community. I’ll turn it over to Abbey to introduce herself and then go
Abbey: Hi, I’m Abbey Marr. I’m an assistant director at the Student Conduct Institute. In that role I work primarily on, with institutions to respond to incidents of sexual misconduct, in particular thinking about Title IX issues. I also do a lot of work focusing on state law in this area and training our campuses on best practices in this area.
Roma: Hi, and I’m Roma. I’m a staff associate here at SUNY. I work for the Got Your Back team, most of my work primarily is on that team, but I also work on the climate survey here at SUNY and other programs such as RAPID.
Julie: Thank you guys, and yes, I did fail to mention that our fearless executive director, Jenny Whittington is joining us today on the call, and she’ll add her two cents as she feels they are warranted. Anyway, thank you guys. It’s great to have you here today, so I’m just going to turn it over to you all and just have you give us an overview of RAPID, and tell us more about it.
Joe: I think RAPID came from frustration that many of us have with efficiently, inexpensively training those who are required to disclose crimes and harassment and violence either under the Clery Act, campus security authorities, under Title IX is what used to be called responsible employees, now it’s called persons of authority, and it really came to a head during COVID, when institutions that used to gather people around in a conference room to do the training for them weren’t able to do, and so some of those frustrations came to bear and we said to ourselves, there’s got to be a better way. Like, let’s say on shark tank, or anything like that, there’s got to be a better way and we worked with Ramapo College, great partner institution, we were able to secure some federal funding to be able to create RAPID, which is responsible authority proficient in incident disclosure, an 11 minute training able to be hosted on any college learning management system or on the web where folks who are faculty or staff, student affairs and the like are able to get the training, and how to recognize the crimes that occur, how to understand what their role is and to learn who to report to when a crime occurs.
Julie: Great, Abbey maybe you can explain to us a little about the legal challenges in this area.
Abbey: Yeah, absolutely. So when we were developing RAPID, as you may have heard Joe talk about, we were thinking a lot about the Clery Act and about Title IX, and that’s because both of these laws have requirements for people on campus. Not only for certain people on our campuses to respond to incidents, but also for others on our campuses to pass along information and make sure they report on information about alleged incidents of crimes, sexual misconduct. In particular the Clery Act defines campus security authorities, which are certain individuals who need to pass on information about Clery-covered crimes to make sure that the campus is noting them for the annual security report and responding when necessary, and then under Title IX we have what we used to think of as our responsible employee framework, now under the 2020 final rules we think of our person’s with authority, our officials with authority to take action, and that’s anyone that we designate on our campuses who have a role in passing along any information that they hear about a possible Title IX incident onto our institution, to our Title IX coordinators to make sure that we are responding appropriately. Bottom line of both of these laws is that there are certain people on our campus that need to know what their responsibilities are, need to know how to report on something they learn of in order for us to be able to take appropriate action, and so this training is designed for those people.
Julie: Great, so Roma, I think Joe touched a little bit on it, but can you tell us how you all came about developing this program? Obviously COVID has been a frustration for everyone, is this something that you thought about working on prior to COVID or has this really been driven by the remote work nature of COVID?
Roma: I think it’s been a combination of both. COVID definitely helped push us further into getting this done in time for what was happening in regards to COVID, but we also wanted, we knew that we needed an online version of office training that doesn’t have to be in person, because often times on a campus and running trainings that are an hour, two hours in person and it’s hard to keep people engaged, especially people that aren’t really that involved in the Title IX/Clery Act work… Your chemistry professor, or your spanish teacher on campus that probably wouldn’t want to be at a one hour, two hour training, so we really wanted to create something that was short and got the main points across that Abbey was talking about in terms of the laws and since the law is really complicated and most people don’t understand legal jargon, like myself, just breaking the jargon and the laws down to like i said, your chemistry professor to be able to understand it, to come away from this 11 minute training and know that, okay, this is what I need to do if I hear of a certain crime, I need to report it to the campus, and that’s the basic goal of the 11 minute RAPID training and that’s how I went into designing it to make sure it’s easy to understand, easy to progress through training and then just a very short quiz at the end to make sure, oh this person was watching and got the basic ideas out of it, but if I hear a crime that is on this list of Clery crimes, I should report it on to the campus and making sure that it’s a combination of passive videos for the more complicated parts so they can just listen and watch along with that, animations, and then some interactive parts that they can click on the different crime definitions and read about what they need to be doing.
Julie: Great, and so have you rolled this out to other campuses besides SUNY?
Roma: Yes, we have. It’s open to any campus across the country and so I think to date we’ve been able to provide it to about 200, 250 campuses in 45 states, I believe.
Julie: Great, and so Roma, what has the response been to the program?
Roma: I think the response overall has been very positive. A few campuses we’ve met with that’ve wanted to know a little bit more about what it was, but it seems most campuses are very grateful to have a resource for, they can upload it into their learning management system or post it on their own website and send a link out to their faculty and staff to take a training and kind of meet the requirements of federal laws have for training them.
Julie: Great, what do you think the main takeaway for this program, and you all can, any of you feel free to answer, what do you think our members, the main takeaway for them, should be for this program, for this learning management program?
Joe: I think one of the things, and I’d ask my colleagues to jump in as well, is you’ve got so many different risk management challenges, you have so many risk challenges, this is an area that we’ve seen in the department on both the Clery Act side and the Title IX side, criticized colleges for not having their staff do the right thing, which isn’t really hard, it’s just recognizing crimes of harassment, violence when they occur, and picking up the phone. We don’t need our faculty members to conduct a six-week investigation, we don’t need our athletic coaches to run a hearing program, we just need them to bring in those folks from the core of the campus who have those hours and hours of training how to invest to gate, and adjudicate. We know this is a program, or we know this is an area where colleges have seen challenges, we know it’s an area where the Department of Education has criticized colleges for not getting it exactly right in identifying the folks who are in these roles, training them, and having them do the minor things they need to do. So we’re always thinking at SUNY about ways we can take bite sized chunks of compliance obligations, apply tech and law and best practices to them in a way that kicks it off the list that lets folks who are risk managers or insurance professionals, now concentrate on the next and higher and more complicated thing, so it is much more complicated to train folks at the core on how to comply. Abbey spends hundreds of hours each year training folks who have to actually run hearings and through the investigations and the like. That is much harder, let’s get this done. We’re not charging anything at SUNY, working with Ramapo, working with the federal government. Get this done, get this customized, get it uploaded, get the list out to your folks to actually meet this very minor training obligation and get onto your higher order list of the more complicated, more important things. We’re going to continue to pump out those kinds of things at SUNY continuing to help our campuses reduce their risk, serve students better, and get the folks who are in the URMIA community onto those higher order, more complicated tasks,
Julie: Well, as a risk manager I can say we really appreciate tools like this that help us do our jobs more efficiently and help the other staff at our universities, do our jobs more efficiently. I think it’s great that higher ed is such a great community of people who want to help one another, and so that’s one of the things I appreciate most about it.. Abbey, were you going to say something?
Abbey: Oh yeah. I was just going to reflect, as Joe said I train a lot of the campus officials who actually run our investigations and for a Title IX and other issues, and then we also hear from, as Roma said, the chemistry professor who can find it very overwhelming to hear that they have reporting obligations or compliance obligations on campus, and so thinking about all of these people on campus juggling so many different things, to come up with a training that is, yes you have a responsibility, but it’s a really clear discreet one and we can help you do it with confidence, got us to our answer, got us to knowing what we needed to do here with that.
Julie: Let me just ask you since you mentioned that, I may not supposed to be asking this question, but what do you say to the chemistry professor who says I’m not going to do this? I understand it’s a case-by-case basis, but I always, I just think it’s interesting to hear what folks that work in this area a lot, what their response to that would be.
Abbey: I would say if it’s in your campus policies, you have to do it. If you are designated by campus security authority or a person with authority or reporting or reporter, whatever you're called on your campus that’s part of your role, but hopefully the training makes it a lot more accessible to know that it’s not a responsibility beyond just making sure you pass along that information.
Joe: I would just add it’s a way of showing respect to the students. If a student comes up to you and says my faculty member gave me a C but I know I have A level work, it must have just been a clerical error, the faculty member doesn’t say let me investigate, let me do this on my own let me keep it to myself. They say, well then call the dean, call the registrar's office, call the faculty member, let’s get this fixed. It’s a matter of respect. If a student says I dropped my dining hall card, the faculty member doesn’t say I’m not participating, I’m not following, they say here’s the office you call to get that. These are some of the hardest things that our students go encounter, incidents and harassment, incidents of violence. Shouldn’t we show them the respect of bringing them forward to the folks on campus who have the training, people like Roma, people like Abbey to respond in the most student-focused trauma-informed law-abiding way.
Julie: Great, that’s very helpful. So I think before we wrap it up this afternoon, is there anything else the three of you would want to share as a closing thought?
Jenny: I have a question, Julie! So I wondered, you had asked, when you introduced Roma, you said something about the Got Your Back program, can you just, I don’t know what that is, can you just tell me a little bit about it?
Roma: So in non-COVID times we go to all of our SUNY campuses and engage the SUNY students and have them assemble, we call them comfort bags, these bags have toiletries, resource information and some self care items, thing like that that we then deliver to various agencies across New York state and these agencies provide them directly to people that have experienced violence.
Jenny: Wow, that’s terrific. I just wanted to give a shout out to the whole SUNY team. I know Joe and I have worked together for years, and really appreciate the good work that you guys are doing, not only for your students but nation, probably internationally you’re helping people in these… they’re so confusing, the Clery and Title IX, so an 11 minute video sounds like a great solution when we all have more on our to-do list than ever, so thank you so much for sharing that with higher education, with the URMIA members, thanks for being on the podcast and thank you to Julie for being our special guest, and back to you, Julie.
Julie: Sure, and again I would like to add my appreciation to Jenny, I just appreciate the three of you being on the podcast today. I will let our listeners know that there is a link in our show notes and also in the description for the podcast with information about the RAPID program, but if any of our listeners have specific questions, can they reach out to one of you guys with those questions?
Joe: Yeah, email rapid@suny.edu and that will get to our team. suny.edu/rapid or search rapid suny in any search bar to get to it right away.
Julie: Great, so you heard it here folks, you can, you have a resource that you can reach out to. So, again thank you all so much for being here today, we really … on behalf of URMIA we really appreciate you all sharing this resource with us. So I really want to today and this wraps up another episode of URMIA matters.