"Having a person in this role is important to ensure the overall effectiveness of the emergency management function at Kent State, including preparing for and responding to emergency situations on our campuses,” said Dean Tondiglia, Kent State’s director of public safety and chief of police.
Marino, 29, was hired in February as a civilian employee within Kent State’s Department of Public Safety. He answered some questions about how he hopes to help Kent State navigate the challenges of our post-pandemic world.
Q: What is the role of the emergency management coordinator for the university?
A: Emergency management is how an entity prepares for, responds to and recovers from a disaster. It can be a natural disaster like a tornado, or even severe thunderstorms, or man-made, like an active shooter or when a group of individuals causes the disaster.
Emergency management is about bringing the right people to the table to deal with any given situation – law enforcement, firefighters – my job is to bring them all together and coordinate the response and loop in university officials. It is about getting all the correct stakeholders together and responding in a cooperative manner.
Emergency management is not really a new concept, but it really took off after 9-11, when the need for coordination became apparent. In the last decade or so, private entities and large organizations, like hospitals and universities, which are really like their own small cities, have seen how they can really benefit from having emergency management officers.
Q: Do you have previous emergency management experience?
A: I came to Kent State from University Hospitals. When I started at UH, I did not even know that emergency management was a thing. I was hired by UH as a chemical safety technician. I was helping the hospital prepare for any CBRN (chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear) event. How would the hospital respond and take care of general environmental safety?
I met the hospital’s emergency management folks and started working with them and just fell in love with the work. Following a retirement in the department, I was able to move into emergency management at UH and worked in their emergency management office for several years.
Q: What are your impressions of Kent State so far?
A: I love it so far and still have much more to learn about Kent State. I was only here a couple of months when the students all left, and I am still new to the idea of coming back and having everything in full swing again.
I have found everyone to be very welcoming and I really am enjoying getting to know all the different stakeholders.
I was shocked at how large the campus is and how many people are here on a day-to-day basis. It really is just like a small city in its sheer size. I am also responsible for the regional campuses, and I was surprised at the number, which is another whole journey for me.
Q: What has been your biggest challenge so far?
A: The biggest challenge that I have faced so far is really the expansiveness of the regional campus system and understanding each campus.
We are one university, all together, but each campus is really its own entity. In terms of emergency response, we must treat each campus as its own, because each has its own location and its own host of people that we need to coordinate with.
On the Kent Campus, we have our own law enforcement, and we work often with the city of Kent police, fire and emergency medical services (EMS), and they really know the students and the property. We want to help ensure those same types of relationships exist between our regional campuses and their local first responders. This has been more of a challenge, so we must continue to do more to make sure we have those connections with all first responders in those areas.
Q: What is your goal for this academic year?
A: I really want to work on producing a new emergency response guide. We are updating the webpage and making it more user-friendly and very accessible to students. Hopefully, they will take the time to go through the guide, so they know what to expect if an emergency happens. Getting more information to students is my biggest goal for this year.
Q: How does a university setting differ from a health care setting?
A: There are more similarities than you might think in terms of how both health care and universities are structured.
I think the biggest challenge for universities, when it comes to emergency response, is that people live here. The Kent Campus is somebody’s home. It’s not like if a large store has a disaster, they can just close the building until the disaster is cleaned up. There are so many people that reside here. The sheer number of people who are living here in itself is what makes the setting unique.
Q: What do you believe is the biggest emergency management challenge facing universities today?
A: In the society we are in today, active shooter response and threat response are two of the biggest things. Over the summer, we had a large functional exercise with Kent State Police, and the city of Kent police, fire and EMS, and we had an active threat exercise that really set the stage for those folks and how we are going to respond together.
We also have some upcoming tabletop exercises planned with President Todd Diacon’s cabinet. In a disaster, we will need leadership from all these groups to be coordinated. We are always actively preparing, so we can be as prepared as possible in the event, God forbid, that we have an event on campus.
Q: Tell us a bit about yourself?
A: I am a native of Dover, Ohio. I got my associate degree from Stark State University, and my bachelor's degree online from Columbia Southern University in Alabama. My wife Nicole and I recently bought a farm in Charlestown Township, just outside of Ravenna, Ohio, and we have a 1-year-old son, Jack.