Over the winter break, Campus Safety added four new full-time officers to the staff. These officers will fill vacant positions on the Campus Safety force as well as one new position in the Department of Campus Safety.

The new officers, Kris Man­waring, Steve Ciolek, Kevin Alt and Jessica Lethgo all have expe­rience in criminal justice. Officers Manwaring, Ciolek and Alt have all previously worked as part-time officers in the Department of Campus Safety. Officer Lethgo is new to Colgate. Her criminal jus­tice background includes a degree in Criminal Justice from SUNY Morrisville and work as a Military Police Officer stationed at Fort Benning, Georgia.

“We had three vacancies that opened up over the year and we needed to do a search for four new full-time officers,” Director of Campus Safety William Ferguson said. “The search included not only those from our staff but from the outside.”

The three vacancies were normal for a large department like Campus Safety, who lost officers to other job offers and as well as one to cancer over the summer.

“In this business, it is fairly typi­cal,” Ferguson said of the vacated full-time officer positions. “Some people take other jobs, some people have to leave, some people are asked to leave. As of today we have all of our full-time positions filled.”

A shortage of officers means the work previously done by full-time employees is delegated to part-time officers. However, the number of part-time officers is not fixed, rath­er, they constitute a pool of employ­ees that Campus Safety can draw upon. This makes unfilled positions tough on the part-time officers who must take these extra shifts.

“When you are short, you put a burden on the other officers … we weren’t operating at our fully au­thorized strength,” Ferguson said. “Overtime is also an issue.”

Although Campus Safety is now operating at its full strength, that does not mean that it will be instituting any new policies or using the officers in new roles. They simply will fill the roles that were previously delegated to part-time officers.

“[These officer positions] were temporarily being filled by part-time officers … there will be no new policies,” Ferguson said.

In conjunction with the hiring of these new officers, Campus Safety has hired four additional part-time officers – Diana Brown, Joseph San­tangelo, Jonathan Smith and Gregory Sanborn – to fill the gap left by the promotion of Officers Manwaring, Ciolek and Alt.

Other developments with Cam­pus Safety include the promotion of Shift Supervisor Officer Gary Bridge to Fire Safety and Emergen­cy Preparedness Manager. In turn, Officer Steve Cook was promoted to Shift Supervisor, which created one of the vacancies in the full-time officer force.