To: Friends World Community
From: Robert Glass, Dean
Re: Safety Information and Procedures

1. The safety of our students is our number one priority. Directors of all our centers abroad and all administrative personnel in the USA are asked to subscribe to the State Department advisory email list and are notified daily of new State Department announcements.  All our students are registered with the US Embassy in the country of residence abroad.

see the link: http://www.state.gov/www/listservs_cms.html

2. The State Department issues announcements in a number of categories: public announcements, travel advisories and travel warnings. Within each category there are a number of gradations.  For instance, on the less severe end of the scale, the State Department might advise Americans not to visit a particular city in a country at a particular time. On the more severe end of the scale, they might ask Americans to leave a particular region within a country.  On rare occasions, the State Department will ask Americans to leave a whole country.   

See the link http://travel.state.gov/travel_warnings.html#i

3. The Friends World Program follows the State Department’s advice in all its announcements, advisories and warnings. We do not go to areas the State Department considers unsafe. Any student who wishes to go to an area presently under a State Department travel warning will not be given approval for such a trip. Students who insist on pursuing such a course of action will be asked to first withdraw from the Friends World Program. We simply cannot support students who wish to study in unsafe areas.

4. The US State Department is not our only source of information on safety. We have local personnel in each country who monitor events at the local level and advise us on safety issues. In general, our safety and evacuation decisions are more conservative than that of the State Department.  We have taken action to remove students in advance of State Department warnings and we have relocated field trips in the absence of State Department announcements. We have experience setting up programs in over a dozen countries around the world and are able to do so at very short notice.

5. As a global education program, Friends World has a great deal of experience in offering programming in a great variety of venues. The Comparative Religion and Culture Program alone has engaged in programming in Japan, Taiwan, Thailand, India, Italy, Greece, Israel and Turkey. Together our centers have experience in supervising student work in dozens of countries. There is simply no reason to travel to areas that are unsafe when there are so many other fine options available to us.

6. Though we will not compromise on our commitment to student safety, neither can we allow the current global tensions to deter us from continuing to pursue our goals of global citizenship and international understanding. Recent events only highlight the need for sincere people of good will to pursue cross-cultural study.  The goals of the Friends World Program seem more relevant than ever.

Robert Glass
Dean, Friends World Program
Long Island University 11/15/06