Utah colleges to implement 25 safety recommendations in the wake of Charlie Kirk's death

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Utah colleges will implement 25 safety recommendations after Charlie Kirk's death.
• The Utah Board of Higher Education approved the task force's recommendations Friday.
• Recommendations include streamlined policies and enhanced threat reporting and communication systems.

SALT LAKE CITY — Utah's colleges and universities are revamping their plans for campus safety after a review from a campus safety task force that was formed after the murder of Charlie Kirk at Utah Valley University.

The Utah Board of Higher Education approved 25 recommendations from the task force on Friday. Commissioner of Higher Education Geoffrey Landward said that while Kirk's death was certainly a catalyst, they have been focused on improving campus safety for a long time.

"I think that if you have an opportunity to learn from something tragic that happens on a campus, we have a responsibility to take that opportunity, to understand it," Landward said. "But this gave us a larger opportunity to say, 'Beyond one campus, what does our entire state look like and where are those gaps? And can we learn something as an entire state and then take action that can benefit all of our campuses together?' And I think that's what we've done here."

Landward explained that the major change is that these recommendations streamline policies across all Utah higher education institutions and allow them to share ideas and resources.

"It becomes scalable, and it becomes easier to form partnerships with other institutions and to bring their resources in," Landward stated. "Everybody's talking the same language, everybody's working from the same playbook, and I think that makes it more efficient and more likely that we can have the kind of safety at all of our campuses, no matter what their size or location is."

The task force's recommendations include making it easier for students and staff to identify and report threats.

"One of the recommendations I think is gonna be most powerful is ensuring that the faculty, the staff, the students, all of them are getting regular training on our procedures, on how to assess threats, and what to do if you see a threat and then we will see on the back side in our institutions multiple points where you can report those kinds of incidents or those kinds of threats," Landward said.

Some of the other recommendations include creating policies for clear communication during emergencies and establishing stricter guidelines for event applications. Some will go into effect immediately, while others will roll out between now and the 2027-2028 school year.

The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.

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