After the UNCC shooting, how will the campus remember the victims?

As UNC Charlotte begins to respond to the deadly campus shooting last week, administrators say they have few immediate answers on how the university plans to respond in the long term.

They’re still reviewing campus safety measures. They can’t say what will happen to the classroom where two students were killed and another four were injured. And they’re not set on how to memorialize those victims, even as online petitions on renaming a building gain steam.

“We’re not going to come to a quick fix,” Chancellor Phil Dubois said at a news conference Wednesday morning. “You can always learn something from these sorts of tragedies, and we intend to learn as much as we can.”

But students and parents will see one change at graduation this weekend, where guests will be required to pass through metal detectors upon entering and exiting campus.

Ellis “Reed” Parlier and Riley Howell, who were killed in the shooting, will receive in memoriam degrees at ceremonies on Saturday. A special presentation will honor Emily Houpt, a graduating senior who was injured in the shooting, during graduation for the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences.

Remembering the victims

Earlier this week, UNCC set up two scholarship funds in honor of Parlier and Howell, while a third fund is raising money for victims and their families.

But anything beyond that is up to a 14-person Rememberance Commission, which has been tasked with considering how to best memorialize the campus tragedy.

The group will first consult with the families of the victims, Dubois said Wednesday, in addition to drawing suggestions from the campus community and from Charlotte residents more broadly at public listening sessions.

Following vigils last week, university archivists have started collecting makeshift memorials from around campus, including candles and flowers placed outside the site of the shooting and at the university’s 49er Gold Miner statue.

As of Wednesday afternoon, over 66,000 people had signed an online petition calling on the university to rename its recreation center after Howell and Parlier. Construction on the center is due to be complete this fall.

But Dubois said that no concrete plans have been made.

“I do understand the impulse that people have to do something,” Dubois said, but “there’s no quick fix on how to memorialize.”

The commission will also determine the future of Kennedy Hall, an academic and office building where the shooting took place, in a high-tech classroom on the second floor.

Exams in Kennedy have been canceled, though the building is now up and running and accessible to the IT staff who work there with registered ID card.

“They don’t love what happened there,” Dubois said, “but they love that building,” noting that many had been trained in active shooter response inside Kennedy.

Security on campus

Campus safety administrators said it was too early to say whether campus would be implementing changes to security measures at the public university’s campus in north Charlotte.

The leafy, 1,000-acre grounds are considered an “open campus,” with multiple entrances from the outside neighborhood and anyone able to enter academic buildings during normal business hours.

But with the push of a button in an emergency dispatch center, all doors on campus can be locked so that no one can enter.

Jeff Baker, the UNCC police chief, suggested that mechanism — and response policies for his officers — were effective.

“If we are ever faced with this, our officers are to go to the sound of gunfire,” he said at the Wednesday news conference.

That’s what happened last week, he said, praising both officers and Howell for their quick response. The 21-year-old has been hailed as a “hero” for tackling the suspected shooter — and likely preventing more deaths.

Counseling and ‘school exit’

Approximately 400 students have sought support from the university since the tragedy, according to David Spano, UNCC’s director of counseling and psychological services.

While the university’s counseling office staffs a team to monitor “students of concern,” Spano said that the office was not tracking the alleged shooter, Trystan Andrew Terrell, before or after he withdrew from classes — including the one where the shooting occurred — earlier this semester.

Among the demands presented by a group of UNCC students before the Mecklenburg County Commissioners on Tuesday was a “school exit program” for students who drop out of Charlotte-Mecklenburg high schools, including exit interviews and job assistance.

“Should a student leave an institution dissatisfied, we don’t want them to be held to that place and weighed down by resentment,” said UNCC student Elissa Miller.

Other school shooters, like Nikolas Cruz in Parkland, Fla., withdrew from the schools they later attacked.

Students also called for a county-wide task force dedicated to studying and preventing gun violence, local government investment in gun violence research, and changes to gun laws, such as limits placed on ammunition purchased at one time.

Staff writer Jane Wester contributed.