The School of Public Safety at Valencia College: visioning and implementation of a college-wide distributive and collaborative program model for the central Florida community

Abstract

The central Florida region, faced with record tourism, a large service population, and significant population growth over the next few decades, must rely on a community-based institution of higher education with lifelong learning offerings, a local community college, to create world class public safety education and training for the region. Furthermore, the literature indicated public safety organizations served by community colleges operate in an open-rational system, while colleges operate in a natural system—and there is no current literature to explain this phenomenon. To establish a new School of Public Safety within these contrasting systems, Valencia College and the central Florida public safety community utilized a collaborative, creative problem solving model with a divergent and convergent thinking strategy to develop the school. It is a school with an on-going intentional public safety service integration training and education philosophy with distributed, isomorphic college-wide public safety programming. The open-rational and natural systems theory explains the strategy and how this theory enhances the School of Public Safety at Valencia College and in central Florida at the social psychological, structural, and ecological levels. The theoretical framework, the comprehensive visioning approach, results of the strategy, values to the student, and public safety organizations and community discussed in this commentary contribute to the body of knowledge on public safety education and training models at community colleges.