Directing
Public Safety on Two Campuses
 It is a fairly typical Wednesday afternoon
for Paul Ominsky. Outside his small office in the public
safety department of Smith College, phones are ringing, students are
at the customer service window asking about parking regulations and officers
are reporting in during a shift change. What’s not so typical is
that Ominsky started this day about eight hours ago, some 10 miles east
in an office on the campus of Mount Holyoke College, where he has been
director of public safety since 1992.
Since December 2003 Ominsky has
been dividing his time between the two campuses and serving
as director of public safety for both colleges, in an arrangement
he calls a “promising
new model of collaboration.”
Ominsky began his public safety career
as a security officer at the University of Massachusetts
Amherst in 1974 and moved up through the ranks there before
leaving the university in 1988 as an acting lieutenant. He went on to
become director of public safety at Westfield State College for four
years before taking the director’s
position at Mount Holyoke. He holds a bachelor’s in
psychology and a master’s in counseling from the University of Massachusetts.
He
has brought to Smith a desire to encourage positive relationships between students
and public safety officers. In addition to providing law enforcement and making
the campus safe, “we want to be a better resource to the Smith
community,” Ominsky says. To that end, the department is now offering
some new services including car lock-out assistance and battery jump-starts
for disabled cars. He reinstated a bike patrol this past summer and is supporting
a revitalized student Emergency Medical Training program. “We’re
always on the lookout for opportunities where the department can join up in
a partnership with student groups. It’s a positive for the department.”
Seeking
state certification, and eventually achieving accreditation, from the Massachusetts
Police Accreditation Commission is a top priority. Mount Holyoke recently
received accreditation status from the commission under Ominsky’s
leadership. Now he would like to see Smith’s department achieve the
same. Certification and accreditation are self-initiated processes, requiring
that a department meet more than 200 mandatory standards covering such areas
as policy development, emergency response planning and communications.
The
shared position of public safety director is the second administrative
collaboration between Smith and Mount Holyoke. Adrianne Andrews, Smith
College’s
ombudsperson, was recently named Mount Holyoke’s new ombudsperson and
began sharing her time equally between the two campuses. -- JME |
