Seth Root/The Broadside

Central Oregon Community College’s Campus Public Services is staying busy even though students are not allowed on campus due to COVID-19.

Scott Brown, the new supervisor of CPS, said that when the pandemic hit in early March, CPS tried to work very hard at making sure people were safe on the campus.

“In large part, early on, a bulk of our work was just environmental health stuff,” Brown said. “We had to figure out how to make the college for those folks that are on campus, safe and healthy. That’s what we focused on for the bulk of the time early on.”

Once students could no longer be on campus, CPS started focusing their attention on other things — like crime prevention by ensuring the structures around the campus were safe.

“As we into the summer, the summer slowed things down for us, which opened the door for doing CPTED, which is crime prevention through environmental design, and we would go to each of the campuses to look at the building structures and make sure they are safe,” Brown said.

Brown also pointed out that just because people off-campus do not mean that CPS neglects their daily duties.

“Whether students are on-campus or off-campus, there are some things that we do that are part of our normal day to day, month to month duties,” Brown said. “Every single month, we have to do a safety audit for all our buildings. It has to do with fire-related materials and first aid related materials. Every single week, we have to tackle screening eyewash stations and the showers in every single building, on every single campus that have eyewash stations so that people are safe and healthy.”

There are still some people working on campus, which CPS deals with daily as well. Brown said those interactions have been great and that CPS has had minimal issues with those that work on campus.

“We have had very little issues with anything along those lines. I think everybody is doing a really good job with social distancing and wearing a mask when required. So, we have had very little issues with that.”

If any students have any questions or would like to contact CPS, Brown’s email is  [email protected]