On Friday, Oct. 31, select NECC faculty, staff and students met with NECC’s presently contracted security company, EIS inc., Haverhill police and other local security institutions to spend a day overviewing safety procedures and scenarios for NECC.

“We’re doing a drill with our public security department, and the company that supports them, Eagle Investigative Services, who is the company that we hired to do that work, along with the local police, fire departments, state police,” said David Gingerella, CFO for NECC. “And so if we had an incident on campus, in this case, it’s a fire, how would we respond to it? What are the things we would do, and demonstrate what we did well and what we might not do so well on. [We’d] correct things things we didn’t do so well and hopefully be prepared if we ever have an emergency on campus.”

“Our plan is to then have an actual test of doing this in June. We will physically have the fire departments, police departments be on campus as if we’re having the event actually occurring, and again find out what we do well and what we don’t do well on,” said Gingerella. “There is nothing more important for this administration than the safety of our students, faculty and staff. That is the utmost importance for us, and we are continuing to do that to work with all the other administrations on campus to make sure that any holes we have in our ability to continue to make people feel safe, [and] that we continue to fill those and are prepared for any kinds of emergencies.”

“We’ve gotten great feedback from students today,” said Dina Brown, head of Student Engagement. “I think it was really good to hear from students in getting their feedback and input about how to make it better.”