When students are on the campus of Southern Connecticut State University in New Haven, the school's goal is to keep them safe. That means if there are any problems on campus, the university wants to know about them.
"The more eyes and ears you have out there, looking and being able to report back to you on those issues, the less problems you have," said Robert Sheeley, Associate Vice President for Capital Budgeting and Facilities Operations at SCSU.
The university has paired up with SeeClickFix, an online service that allows staff and students to report issues on campus. Students can go online and report problems ranging from graffiti, cracked sidewalks, broken windows or lights out in the parking lots. There's also an app for it.
"You can take out the SeeClickFix app, when you open it on Southern's campus, and you take a photo and get the GPS location, describe the issue, it will be sent right into their work order system as well," said Ben Berkowitz, co-founder of SeeClickFix.
SCSU is the first university that has purchased the company's issue-tracking software and custom mobile apps.
"I think in the case of Southern, it was really just a practical maintenance requests that they need to know what is broken on campus and they wanted the students to be able to tell them, and it's just good customer service on behalf of the university," said Berkowitz.
Southern says it will be monitoring the requests every day to see where the problems are.
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"If they put something in and report it, they can go back and see if it's going to be addressed, how it's been addressed, when it was addressed," said Sheeley.
