LAS VEGAS, Nev. (FOX5) – Monday kicks off Rebel Ready Week on the UNLV campus as freshmen move in and get acquainted with their surroundings.
“It’s not the first day of class, but it almost feels like it,” UNLV President Keith Whitfield told FOX5 at the Thomas and Mack Center before an orientation assembly Monday morning. “You get on campus for the first time and it’s very exciting.”
Whitfield was looking forward to helping the incoming students become oriented with their new home.
“What we’ve found is that this week is critically important for students being able to continue on, because you learn so much in a full week worth of orienting yourself,” he said. “It makes it so that long-term, you’re going to be more successful. That’s why we’re doing it.”
Whitfield is focused partly on making the new students feel safe.
“Safety is a forever thing,” he said. “You just have to do it all the time.”
Whitfield hopes to do this partly through fostering a sense of solidarity with each other.
“Part of the safety piece of it is just us as a Rebel community, and that’s what this does, is it kicks off you understanding that you’re a part of that community,” he explained.
Whitfield pointed toward more concrete measures, like increasing security officers around campus.
“We’re going to have them here through to fall for sure,” he said. “It makes a difference. It makes a difference in terms of visibility, being able to know that someone is there.”
There will also be more cameras, sophisticated locks, and phones that warn of campus emergencies in Beam Hall, where three faculty members were shot and killed last December.
“There’s things like that in Beam Hall that we’re going to see how they actually work and then see if we can scale them to the rest of the university,” Whitfield said.
The UNLV President plans to go to the state legislature and ask for more money to be put toward security measures moving forward.
Classes begin next Monday, August 26.
Copyright 2024 KVVU. All rights reserved.
