Student members of the Warrior Watch program.
Founding member Joshua Palmer is very pleased with the awareness and life-saving techniques he’s gained through Warrior Watch.
He also is happy that his new skill set has not been put into real-time use.
Warrior Watch, a bystander intervention program developed by the CSU Stanislaus Safe Campus Committee, will be celebrating its first anniversary in June. Its goal is to provide students with the tools to identify and prevent behaviors that can lead to alcohol-related deaths, discrimination, harassment or sexual violence. Prospective members must pass courses in each of those areas.
“I haven’t been placed in a situation where I needed to intervene and provide assistance,” Palmer said. “However, the training has provided the added confidence that should I encounter a situation where someone was in need of help, I would be able to provide them with assistance.”
The program’s one-year pilot period included 86 students and was mandatory training for resident assistants in the Residential Life Village as well as for new student orientation leaders and peer health educators. As Campus Compliance Officer Julie Johnson pointed out, the training received by Warrior Watch members can be applied in countless on- and off-campus situations.
“A student who also is an employee at a local In-Shape Club said that prior to the training she thought that she would never get involved in other people’s issues,” Johnson said. “But a club member told her that she thought someone was in the parking lot breaking into cars. She called the cops because she remembered that part of the training and they caught the person.”
Johnson said that as a pilot program it was important for Warrior Watch to be able to measure its success, and that such metrics likely wouldn’t exclusively be in the form of counting the number of interventions performed by members.
“One measure we’re using is data from surveys given to participants at one-, three-, and six-month intervals to ask them about their retention of the training materials and whether they’ve implemented the training in any situations,” Johnson said. “Going forward, we hope that one measure of success will be growing interest in participation in the program.”
Data released in early May underscored some of the successes within the program in terms of awareness and confidence in the ability to intervene in crisis situations.
For instance, in evaluation questions asked before and after Warrior Watch training:
- There was a 25 percent increase in students’ acknowledgment of their personal need to intervene in problem situations.
- There was a 44 percent increase in the number of students who believed they possessed the skills to intervene.
- There was a 62 percent increase in the number of students who felt confident they could explain to someone how the University could help them deal with personal crises.
In addition, 29 percent of the Warrior Watch members reported using the MUST-HELP acronym to identify the signs and symptoms of alcohol poisoning. None reported using the acronym prior to training.
The acronym, a cornerstone of the Aware, Awake, Alive program, is a prompt for students to identify the symptoms of alcohol poisoning including mental confusion, unresponsiveness, snoring, vomiting, hypothermia, erratic breathing, loss of consciousness and pale or bluish skin.
“The training encourages students to be aware of what is going on around them,” said Palmer, who is working toward his master’s degree in education with a concentration in counselor education. “We’re noticing the warning signs, the clues of a possible crisis situation. I have definitely been more aware of my surroundings and keep an eye out for trouble. I want my campus to be a safe place for everyone and this training has allowed me to contribute to providing that safe environment.”
Warrior Watch traces its origin to a January 2014 Aware, Awake, Alive conference at the CSU Chancellor’s office in Long Beach, at which a group from Fresno State discussed its “Watchdog” intervention program. The Fresno group modeled its program after the “Red Watch Band” program at New York’s Stony Brook University.
“When I was asked to be a part of the Safe Campus Initiative and we started talking about creating a student group that would help promote a safer campus environment, I jumped at the chance to help in its creation,” Palmer said. “I knew that this program would be my chance to leave something behind — a legacy that would help current and future students and create a culture where students take an active role in their University.”
With one successful year behind it, the question now becomes what’s next for Warrior Watch.
“Since this is a new program, we’re operating on a shoestring budget,” Johnson said. “We’re providing t-shirts and watches, but we’ll make it grow as large as the student interest will support it.
“President (Joseph F.) Sheley spoke to our students at our Warrior Watch reception, and his point was that we’ve made Warrior Watch a campus movement and that we now need to focus on not letting it plateau or decline. We do need to keep this movement going by effectively engaging our students.”