Region’s colleges largely compliant with state anti-sexual assault law

ALBANY  — The Capital Region’s colleges and universities fared well in an audit of a 2015 state law that asked schools to update policies and training aimed at preventing sexual assault on campus.

All of the region’s schools were either compliant or “significantly compliant” with the law, according to the audit. Significantly compliant means the school still had some issues that needed to be addressed but that didn’t rise to the level of non-compliance.

The law, known as Enough is Enough, established new rules for colleges and universities to update policies and procedures, train students about consent and reporting sexual assault incidents, conduct a campus climate survey and other rules. 

While the majority of schools statewide were largely compliant with the law, nearly 30 schools were listed as non-compliant, including many religious, highly-specialized and online schools.

“[The state office of campus safety] finds the review encouraging but not satisficatory,” according to the report released Tuesday by Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s office. “New York state expects and will continue to pursue 100 percent compliance.”

About half of the state’s schools — 244 were reviewed under the audit — still had work to address small concerns. Of 15 colleges in the area, 10 were compliant, including Siena, Skidmore, Union, College of St. Rose and the University at Albany, while five were significantly compliant, including RPI and Schenectady County Community College. 

Union College, for example, needed to post its sexual assault climate survey results on its website; the college’s Title IX coordinator, Melissa Kelley, who oversees the school’s sexual assault prevention and response program, said she needed to present the survey results to the Board of Trustees before making it public.

Kelley joined Union two years ago when the school created a full-time Title IX coordinator position. Title IX is the federal law the governs colleges’ responses to complaints of sexual harassment or violence and prohibits discrimination based on gender.

All new Union students receive multiple layers of training on affirmative consent — interpreting consent as requiring an affirmative agreement — school policies and how to report violations. The students are given an online course prior to arriving on campus and receive further training during orientation. Student leaders and athletes also receive annual training.

Kelley said she hopes to increase the ways and places that students are educated on sexual assault prevention, looking to partner with other departments to figure out the best way to deliver those messages to different students.  

“What we try to do is have information in as many different ways and in as many different places as possible,” she said. “How do we take that same message and make sure students who identify differently hear the same message, tailoring the education to meet their needs.”

Issues of consent and campus sexual assault are more on students’ radars than in the past, but many students still come to college without a strong foundation of sexual education, Kelley said.

“Students aren’t being adequately educated or prepared,” she said. “They are coming to college and some of the students are hearing this for the first time.”   

At SUNY Cobleskill, listed as significantly compliant, auditors said the school’s sexual misconduct policy “can be confusing at times because they have inconsistent messages in the policy at different points.” Lynn Berger, who oversees the college’s Title IX enforcement, said over time the policy has come to include a lot of information the school deemed useful. She said they will evaluate how to streamline the policy and respond to the audit’s concerns.

Berger said more broadly the new state law pushed the school to refine its process for handling sexual assault and harassment cases, paying closer to attention to documenting every step of an investigation. 

“Are we tracking everything that happens along that road, action steps we have been taking all along that we haven’t necessarily been documenting,” Berger said. “We need to capture every little step.”

The college is also working to provide ongoing education about affirmative consent and sexual assault through programs and events that occur throughout the year. The school has hosted theatrical performances that touched on the issues as well as a trained sexologist.

“We try to engage not just from here is the policy, but engage in a way that it’s interactive and sometimes fun even though you are dealing with a challenging topic,” she said.  

Categories: News, Schenectady County