All dorms and several other buildings on the Wayne State College campus now have card access. Due to this, during certain times of the day specific buildings will not be accessible without the use of a Wildcat ID.
“Other than all of the dorms we have card access on Connell, Humanities, the Kanter Student Center, the Rec Center and the stadium,” said Jason Mrsny, head of campus security. “The plan is to phase other doors in as well. We had enough money to cover the initial part of the project of what we have right now. The dorms are the highest priority. Then, with what money we still had available we picked some other high priority doors to put card access on.”
Although there can be problems and dislikes with any new initiative on college campuses, the overall feeling from the experts of security and residence life here at Wayne State ensure everyone it’s for the safety of the students, and that it is definitely a positive thing.
“With the residence halls it really is an advancement for us in terms of looking at what other residence programs do to enhance their safety and security measures. So, this is something I thought would be a great thing to add,” said Quinneka Lee, director of Residence Life. “Wayne is thought of as a safe community, but you never know what may happen.  So for example, if you’re ever in a circumstance where we have an active shooter on campus, we now have the ability to lock that building right away, and it makes things a lot easier.’’
When it comes to security on campus we aren’t necessarily lacking but we aren’t ahead of the game either. According to Mrsny, this is a step in the right direction.
“We’re playing catchup as far as the card access world goes,” Mrsny said. “There are many other schools and businesses that have been using this for years. It’s a way to provide for a safe campus, especially the dorm areas.”
We want to protect the students as much as we can. This college takes that very seriously. Card access is just one way for us to be able to do that.”
Lee also has high hopes for Wayne State and sees things like this progressing, even if it is in the distant future.
“I would love to see one day having residential rooms be card accessed too instead of hard keys, but that’s probably like a 2027 dream,” Lee said. “There are going to be hiccups, but you know there’s the kinks that you have to work out when you implement something new. A lot of it is learning and really figuring out how the system will work best for our campus so that next year and the years forward we will have a good system in place.”