Students who wish to learn about important safety issues on this campus may not be able to find it from Kent State’s homepage.

The homepage, located at www.kent.edu, lacks safety and police links that would better serve students by being a mouse click away.

It can be found by connecting through the Administration link, then the Business and Finance link, or by typing “police services” or “public safety” in the search box on the homepage.

Alice Ickes, crime prevention officer for the campus police department, said she does not know what the reasoning was for not putting a safety or police link on the homepage. She said it would help students and their parents recognize the risks in the environment they live in. Students can stay up to date on campus safety issues.

“We’ve noticed other departments have a direct link, but not us,” Ickes said. “It would be nice to make it easily accessible. We’ll do whatever we can to make that happen.”

Vice President of administration David Creamer said the problem is being worked out.

“We value the safety of the campus very highly, and we want to correct the page now that we understand there is a problem,” Creamer said. “This was unintentional, and we want students to know we’re taking care of it.”

Tom Neumann, associate vice president of communication and marketing, said the marketing department, which updates and edits the homepage, is in the process of redoing it. Neumann said plans are in the works to add functions to make it easier to search and find what users are looking for in the fewest clicks possible.

“We’ve done a complete usability study,” Neumann said. “This August or September we’ll be putting an entirely new page in place. We’ll be adding an alphabetical search function that allows people to search by the first letter of the word.”

Contact safety reporter Michael Lewis at [email protected].