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| From the issue dated October 28, 2005 |
The Front Line in Training for Disasters
Community colleges prepare 85% of 'first responders' but say they are shortchanged in competition for federal dollars
Chart: The U.S. Department of Homeland Security spent the majority of money for training "first responders" on equipment, instead of on training and exercises
Related articles: View all of the articles and commentary from this special supplement on community colleges
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Owens Community College trains hundreds of firefighters and police officers on its Toledo, Ohio, campus each year. If terrorists ever take aim at the city, odds are good that Owens graduates will be among the first on the scene. So when officials of the college realized that no facility existed near Toledo to simulate such disaster scenarios, they made plans to construct a 110-acre, $25-million training complex.
That was 18 months ago. Today the scheduled completion of the facility has been pushed back from 2005 to the spring of 2006, and the college hasn't raised nearly enough money to cover the price tag. The Ohio Board of Regents has given $2-million to the effort, and several local businesses have contributed materials and props, including rail cars and a full-scale gas station. But the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and its state office in Ohio, which might seem to be the most obvious sources of support for such a facility, have contributed nothing.
Owens officials aren't happy about the lack of federal money — and they have plenty of company on community-college campuses throughout the country. Those colleges provide initial or continuing education to 85 percent of the nation's "first responders" — police officers, firefighters, and emergency technicianssays the American Association of Community Colleges. A survey by the association in 2004 found that 65 percent of the 344 responding community colleges had retooled their curricula in response to new training needs related to homeland security.
Miami Dade College, for example, has in the past 18 months provided eight hours of entry-level training on the effects of weapons of mass destruction and on the use of personal protective equipment to 8,700 people, including not only first responders but also employees of schools, hospitals, and public-works facilities.
But so far, the dollars flowing to community colleges to support such training are a trickle compared with those spent by the Department of Homeland Security on university research and equipment for fire and police stations. The University of Minnesota, the University of Southern California, and Texas A&M University lead research efforts that have each received $12-million or more in homeland-security funds.
That leaves many community-college officials feeling that their role in preparing for disasters, whether man-made or natural, has gone unappreciated by both the federal government and the state administrators who dole out the majority of homeland-security funds. The colleges say they need additional money to modify their curricula, establish training sites, and train more first responders if the country is to effectively prepare for the kinds of threats that were hardly envisioned before September 11, 2001, as well as for natural catastrophes like Hurricane Katrina.
"We have the expertise," says Paul Unger, Owens's provost. "We want to save the country money by not reinventing the wheel of the training infrastructure."
The problem in community colleges' quest for homeland-security money is a familiar one: They have faced not so much outright discrimination as benign neglect. Most of the federal homeland-security funds potentially available to community colleges flow through a state office, which then passes along 80 percent of such funds to local or regional decision makers within the state.
The federal government sets certain restrictions on how the money can be spent: It cannot be used for building projects, for example, which explains why Owens Community College has received no funds from Ohio Homeland Security, the state administrator. But in categories like equipment, planning, training, and exercises that simulate disaster scenarios, states and municipalities are free to allocate the money as they see fit. Fire and police chiefs arguably have the greatest say over how the funds are spent at the local level, and they have overwhelmingly funneled the money into equipment — spending more than eight times as much on gear, vehicles, and other hardware as on training and exercises.
"The localities have always wanted to buy equipment, and this has been their chance to do it," says George R. Boggs, president of the American Association of Community Colleges, who has heard a number of college presidents grumble about the challenges of obtaining homeland-security funds. "But one would think that the people buying the equipment would need some training and upgrading of their skills."
Pam Whitelock is president of Prepare America, a coalition of 250 community colleges that is pushing for more federal support for homeland-security training. She says the ubiquitous requests for new equipment — coupled with no federal and very few state requirements about how much homeland-security training is required for first responders — have put community colleges in a difficult position.
"Are we going to argue over the need for an emergency-response vehicle or equipment for a firefighter?" Ms. Whitelock, who recently retired as dean of lifelong learning at Gulf Coast Community College, in Panama City, Fla., asks rhetorically. "So, in most cases, training has gone by the wayside or been handled in a hit-or-miss way."
Aside from state spending, the other potential source of money for community colleges is the department's Competitive Training Grants Program, which supports projects that help the country prevent, respond to, and recover from incidents of terrorism. The program, which has been in existence for two years, distributes $30-million annually, but community colleges have received only three of the 29 awards. Four-year institutions have won 15. The remaining awards were won by institutes, associations, and states.
The training-grants program is small compared to the $2.3-billion in homeland-security spending at the state level, where equipment expenditures reign. And community-college advocates aren't the only ones who are concerned about the relatively modest sums being spent on training and exercises compared with outlays for equipment. Kenneth L. Morckel, director of the Ohio Department of Public Safety, which includes the state's homeland-security division, says he has spoken directly with Michael Chertoff, U.S. secretary of homeland security, about the need for more training.
"We need to move the pendulum more toward the training and particularly the exercising, and away from the equipment," Mr. Morckel says.
Even though federal regulations prevent him from providing money for it, he believes that the Owens training facility would be "a great resource" for first responders in Ohio. He points to the harm caused by the interagency confusion following Hurricane Katrina as an example of why exercises are so important. "What you don't practice," he says, "you're not going to do well."
Marc Short, a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security, says its officials share the concern that too much of the money that has gone out to the states has been used to purchase equipment. The requirement that the money be spent within two years may have influenced decisions, he says, since it is easier to buy equipment than to assemble a training program.
"I believe we'll see a long-term shift toward the training and the exercises with the continued allocation of those dollars," Mr. Short says.
Beginning in 2006, the department will allow every state to name one or more training partners that would deliver courses that have been approved by the Office for Domestic Preparedness, the arm of the department responsible for preparing the country for acts of terrorism. To date the office has relied most heavily on just a few such partners to provide training, including three universities — Louisiana State, Texas A&M, and the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology.
While those institutions and others will continue to provide highly specialized training, more-general training could fall to community colleges in a number of states.
"I think this is a move by ODP to turn some of the authority over to the states and to the community colleges who are the experts in training," says Bryan Renfro, director of the Institute of Corporate and Public Safety at Northwest Arkansas Community College, in Bentonville.
Northwest Arkansas is one of the three community colleges that have won direct awards through the Department of Homeland Security's Competitive Training Grants Program. The college, which received $1-million a year ago, is working closely with three corporations based in or near Bentonville — Wal-Mart, J.B. Hunt, and Tyson Foods — to develop a series of courses that will integrate corporate executives into the community emergency-planning process.
The department, which had indicated an interest in supporting corporate-sector training, encourages partnerships in its grant competitions. "The folks in Washington are really looking for collaborative efforts," Mr. Renfro says. "We had three key corporate partners that could work to bridge that training gap."
Kirkwood Community College, in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, received a $3.1-million award in 2004 from the competitive-grants program to develop a "train the trainer" program in agricultural terrorism. Since the early 1990s, when Kirkwood first received a federal grant to support hazardous-materials training, the college has built a network of 125 community colleges and other partners in 35 states that send educators and technicians to receive instruction from Kirkwood. Those people then return home to train others in their own communities.
The major fear with "agroterrorism" is that an animal disease, such as foot-and-mouth disease, could be introduced in the United States, wreaking economic havoc. Kirkwood's training will show first responders how to control an outbreak.
"When they gave us that grant, the point they made time and time again was that this was a no-brainer," says Doug Feil, Kirkwood's director of environmental-health-and-safety programs. "We have an established network to get the training out, and by having the network, the department didn't have to build a new one."
Only one community college, Waukesha County Technical College, was among the 15 winners in the latest round of competitive-training grants, which were announced in September. The college received $750,000 to develop courses on general aviation and airport security for first responders and airport personnel.
The number of community colleges that have successfully obtained large homeland-security grants through other avenues is tiny. One such institution is St. Petersburg College, a community college that also offers some four-year degrees. The Florida college established its National Terrorism Preparedness Institute in 1998 — three years before the September 11 terrorist attacks — and for the past four years has received more than $2-million per year as a training partner with the Office for Domestic Preparedness. Among other things, the funds support monthly broadcasts, transmitted from the college via satellite, of round-table discussions with experts on various aspects of homeland security.
William H. Janes, the institute's director, says he doesn't necessarily agree with the notion that community colleges are being snubbed. "I don't know what a fair amount for community colleges is — I try to avoid those sorts of discussions," he says. "The advantage I have is that by being in existence since 1998, we have the relationships and the credibility."
The American Association of Community Colleges and the Transportation Security Administration, a division of the Department of Homeland Security, struck a deal last year in which five colleges around the United States provide self-defense training to airline pilots and flight attendants. But the numbers involved in the program so far have been modest. Miami Dade, for example, holds about one class per month, for 10 to 25 students, and has received about $100,000 in federal funds for its work.
The bigger dollars for training flow through the state administrators. Florida's Department of Education has paid Miami Dade $800,000 in federal homeland-security funds to provide entry-level training to 8,700 first responders and others.
Ronald Grimming, director of the college's School of Justice and Homeland Security, says the overall level of federal support is not sufficient. "Quite frankly, we do a lot of other homeland-security training that we've received no funding for," he says. "We essentially end up having to do this on our own."
Some community-college officials suggest that the process for distributing training funds is broken, and that the federal government needs to assert greater control. The Public Safety Institute at Tarrant County College, in Fort Worth, operates a $20-million, 23-acre training site that includes five buildings with computer-controlled fires, a swift-water rescue area, and an emergency-driving course. Ted P. Phillips, the institute's division chair, says the college has created its homeland-security training largely on the fly, as public agencies and private companies have come to the college asking for help with instruction and the use of its facility.
"It would make more sense to me if community colleges were in the direct-funding loop from the federal government," Mr. Phillips says. "If they funded us directly, we could offer and deliver the courses that we are doing anyway, but we could better plan, schedule, and staff those courses."
Some training officials at community colleges argue that the current structure is only now beginning to work. The Kentucky Community and Technical College System, which comprises 16 colleges on 65 campuses, recently was hired to coordinate all official training exercises for the state's homeland-security office. That work, coupled with some community outreach, will bring in $940,000 per year.
"The time is close where the research has been done and it's time to start getting boots on the ground," says Bob Hammonds, the system's director of homeland-security initiatives. "I'm very optimistic about the future of training for homeland security at community colleges."
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OVEREQUIPPED AND UNDERTRAINED? Community-college officials argue that training for "first responders" is being neglected by the state and local officials who make decisions about how to use money from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. In 2004 a total of $2.3-billion from the department was used to purchase equipment -- more than eight times the amount spent on training and exercises (simulating disaster scenarios).
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Section: Community Colleges
Volume 52, Issue 10, Page B1