Public address system in works

Vice President of Administrative Services Rolf Schleicher said Pierce College has put funding into a bond to add a public address system to the school’s in case of emergency. It was widely agreed upon at the Pierce College Council (PCC) meeting on Oct. 24 that though the response to the Oct. 16 threat at Pierce College was an improvement to its emergency communication, there were still issues to be resolved.

Concerns about campus safety and emergency response have been emphasized particularly this semester after two incidents caused a campus lockdown and evacuation within weeks of each other.

The most recent incident started when Deputy Alfred Guerrero received a call about a private message sent on Facebook that said, “Do you have class tomorrow at Pierce? Don’t go.”

Attached to the message were pictures of loaded automatic weapons.

“We checked his Facebook profile and found things that were redflag-ish,” Guerrero said. “I can’t talk about what they were right now as this is an ongoing investigation.” hottest fire you could imagine and doing backflips through it.”

Pierce College President Kathleen Burke and Guerrero acknowledged the outstanding response from the city. California Highway Patrol, special units and the FBI immediately responded to the threat, according to Guerrero.

The update announcements came as a surprise to the senators, however. After Cadena began speaking about them, the senators expressed that they had not been included in the plan’s recent revisions.

Joe Perret, professor of computer applications and senate treasurer, said that even though there was some faculty input in the recent updates, the Academic Senate should have been directly consulted on the matter.

“We need to make sure that any revisions to this plan are approved by the shared governance factors here on campus,” Perret said. “There may have been faculty input, but those select faculty members don’t necessarily represent the whole faculty governance of the campus.”

Another senator, professor of psychology Angela Belden, shared a similar opinion to Perret.

“We see a lot of unilateral decisions being made without shared governance,” Belden said. “We’re a senate, we need to do something.”

Belden’s statement was received with applause from her fellow senators during the meeting.

Despite Cadena’s assurances of fidelity in regards to the construction plans, some senators remained unsure of how efficient the construction will actually be once it starts.

Constance Moffatt, instructor of art history, said that she hopes the builders perform better on the North of Mall projects than they did on the South of Mall ones.

“I would like the builders to get some feedback from the users of those buildings in the North of Mall area,” Moffatt said. “I just hope that they do a great job.”

There are two types of flu vaccines, but Pierce only uses the injectable inactive virus, according to Benne.

“The inactive, which is what we gave, works in three to four weeks,” Benne said. “It technically can’t make you sick.”

Students are encouraged by the Health Center to make an appointment for the flu vaccine to face the annual flu season that started this month.