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A New School Year Brings New Techniques To Address Campus Safety

PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey traveled to Center City Tuesday for a timely round table discussion about campus safety with security experts from some local colleges.

It's not only the normal uncertainties that incoming students and their parents face... it's the unseen threats and pitfalls that lurk on campus. Senator Casey said it's therefore incumbent on administrators to lay it all out for them.

"What is prohibited. what will get you in a lot of trouble if you're an assailant or a perpetrator of a crime," he said. "I think those students and their families want to know that there are gonna be policies and procedures in place to protect them."

The panel exchanged procedures on addressing such as sexual assault, stalking, cyber bullying and gun violence. They also talked about their own unique campus challenges. At Temple University, Director of Campus Safety Charles Leone said student-neighbor relations have become a delicate balancing act, as the campus continues to encroach on the surrounding neighborhood.

"You have a group being the students that go to bed at five in the morning. And you have another group being our neighbors and community that wants to wake up at five in the morning to go to work," Leone said. "So we have some challenges with that, just trying to be a good neighbor and we have a lot of initiatives that we put out there."

Casey co-authored the Campus Sexual Violence Elimination or (SaVE) Act, which covers exactly what he is talking about. It also requires that incidents of domestic and dating violence, sexual assault, and stalking be disclosed in campus crime statistic reports.

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