OSU Undergraduate Student Government President Taylor Stepp says the biggest challenges include teaching students how to schedule classes in the new system, and a new requirement that all students take a Friday class.

Under the quarter system, many OSU classes are offered just twice a week for a total of five credit hours. Semester systems have students attend shorter classes more frequently.

The switch to semesters also means OSU will be doing away with its well-known system of bells.

OSU is one of the few universities that still uses bells to mark the beginning and end of classes at 18 minutes and 30 minutes past every hour.

University officials say class start and end times will change under the semester system, so standardized bells would be confusing.

Click the play button above to hear an extended conversation with USG President Taylor Stepp about the challenges and benefits of switching to semesters.

But the Columbus Division of Police and OSU Police continue to struggle over a mutual aid agreement to police one of the most densely-packed neighborhoods in the nation.

The University District

The neighborhood east of High Street is, for all intents and purposes, an extension of the OSU campus. The vast majority of residents are OSU students, crammed into apartment buildings and fraternity houses.

But it’s not officially part of the OSU campus, so OSU Police officers cannot patrol the area, or even cross the street to help.

“The students themselves asked ‘why couldn’t university police officers patrol their neighborhoods,’” Denton said.

At least part of the reason is an agreement with the union representing Columbus police officer.

Aging Agreement Between Columbus and OSU

Most of the University District lies in the jurisdiction of the Columbus Division of Police. The basic rules: OSU police patrol campus property and buildings, and Columbus police patrol the area around campus.

Neither can operate independently on the other’s turf.

But the two agencies do corporate under a mutual aid agreement put in place in 1992.

“They can ask us to help them, we can ask them to help us,” says Columbus Police Commander Terry Moore. “But it doesn’t go beyond that. They don’t have jurisdiction to act independently in the city of Columbus.”

The mutual aid agreement has not been updated in 20 years, and OSU Police Chief Denton says it needs to be.

OSU Cops Want To Help

Denton says the increased awareness in crime has raised concerns among parents, students and staff. He wants to give OSU officers authority to patrol streets just off campus.

He says an increased police presence would help drive down crime.

“So anything that we can do to respond, to assist, to support Columbus police, to support the students, I think would have value in that regard.”

Denton says the patrols would help reduce crime, but Commander Moore says there is no evidence to support that claim.

“To speculate and say that more officers in a given area is going to have a specific effect is something that you can’t…you can’t say that specifically.”

Denton says OSU Police already has open ended mutual aid agreements with 3 neighboring police departments,Upper Arlington, Bexley and Clinton township.

“When I look across the state of Ohio, and the country I see examples of mutual aid agreements and jurisdictional agreements between campus agencies and their city counterparts that are very broad and open ended,” Denton says.

And Denton stresses OSU property would remain his officers main priority.

“Primarily, we want our officers to patrol campus and university property first and foremost, which means residence halls, academic areas, our facilities, the medical center. All of those are where our officers should be deployed first and foremost.”

Union Rules Block Expansion

CPD Commander Moore says in order to establish an expanded mutual aid agreement between the two departments, it would have to serve four purposes.

“It benefits OSU it benefits the City of Columbus, and it benefits the residents. And then the officers that work for both agencies,” Moore says.

The city of Columbus, the mayor’s office, OSU Police and Columbus Police have been in talks for quite sometime now, but Denton says the time frame for establishing joint jurisdiction is undefined.

“I really cant give you a time frame, there are very complex legal, contractual issues, operational issues that we have to still work through and discuss, and formalize in some respect.”

By contractual issues, Denton means Columbus Police currently has a union contract with the Fraternal Order of Police that does not allow the city to contract out any police work to other agencies.

One potential hold up is deciding whether allowing OSU poice cars to assist in the off-campus area violates the contract out clause. While Columbus Police works through revising its contract with the Fraternal Order of Police it might be quite sometime, if ever, before OSU Police cars can cross high Street in an effort to help students.

It was a cold and blustery afternoon as Ohio State students hurried across High Street near the Ohio Union.

The students were not far, in some cases just blocks, from recent robberies, some of which involved hand guns. One student had a gun held to his head while suspects forcibly took valuables. Most of these incidents have taken place late at night or in the early morning hours.

First told to walk in pairs, students now have been advised to stay in groups after a pair of students was robbed.

Senior Kyle Cox is a geology major. Despite the robberies, Cox said he has not taken extra precautions, even at night.

“It might just be because I’ve been here for so long and nothing has happened to me. And so it might be a false sense of security,” Cox said.

But some students are nervous about walking around by themselves. 21-year-old Courtney Kessler is a transfer student who starts classes in January. Kessler already lives In the north campus area and is aware of the recent crimes.

“I make sure that I walk with somebody at all times because I’m a female and young and lately on the news it’s been crazy. I don’t really go outside because I’m afraid of it,” she said.

Senior Alexis Cantu and Junior Lindsey Cullums walked together on campus. Cantu and Cullums said they have not changed their habits because of the robberies – they said they feel safe since the crimes have not happened in their neighborhood. And neither woman is sure what university administrators could do to ensure student safety or curb the crime problem.

“I think that the problem is way more deeply ingrained than anything they can take care of in two weeks. I think it’s systemic. I don’ t know I think there are larger problems at work that are causing the problem,” Cantu said.

“Yeah, I think the root is poverty,” Cullums said. “Unless they’re planning on solving poverty in the city of Columbus, I don’t think it’s going to make a big difference.”

Freshman Nathan Miller is a business major who also wonders what more can be done that’s not already in the works to keep students safe.

“I see a large police presence on campus most of the time. Like even I see at night there’s usually like a police officer almost on every block. So you can’t prevent everything,” Miller said.

While there have been about a half dozen crime alerts in the past six weeks – several involving hand guns – Columbus Police Sergeant Rich Weiner said the number of robberies in the area where the recent crimes have taken place are no higher than they were last year. Actually, Weiner said, the numbers are flat.

“With the enhancement of technology and media resources and outlets, there’s a lot of information that is available to people now a days that wasn’t available five years ago or even last year. So yeah, with these crime alerts, we’re not saying that they’re not being used effectively, we believe that the more information students have the more prepared they are to handle an encounter and the more prepared they are to prevent an encounter,” he said.

As of last week, Columbus Police had made some strides in the robberies. A teenage girl was charged with receiving stolen property after the car she was riding in was pulled over by police. The teen was carrying a stolen debit card.

“We will be comparing forensic evidence collected at some of these other robbery scenes,” Weiner said. “We will look to see if it matches any of these individuals that were detained.”

All five people in the car were taken into custody and a robbery victim was called to a line-up but was unable to identify any of them. All but the female teenager were released.

On the Ohio State University campus, a group of students, faculty and community members says they’ll occupy the Oval beginning at noon to protest corporate influence on governments and OSU.

Protesters are criticizing Ohio State’s “irresponsible subcontracting, privatizing of university property, and lack of transparency.”

In Cincinnati, another 11 people were arrested early Sunday after refusing to leave a downtown square. Those arrests came after 23 protesters camping after closing hours at nearby Piatt Park were arrested last week.

No injuries were reported in the fire that broke out Wednesday morning at True House on the Ohio campus in Athens. The state fire marshal’s office says in a statement that everyone was able to get out safely.

With the investigation still ongoing, authorities aren’t saying how the fire was set. They say it was confined to the first-floor room where it started. Other rooms sustained heat and smoke damage.

The fire marshal’s office says a reward of up to $5,000 is being offered for information leading to those responsible for the fire.

Meanwhile, a special Ohio Task Force on Campus Security is issuing its final recommendations. Statehouse correspondent Bill Cohen reports.

“It’s close to the classes, so we don’t have to walk so far,” Luna says. “It’s where we live right. All our friends live pretty much in the same area, so I just want to stay there for now.”

Luna lives in zip code 43201. It includes areas adjacent to the University’s campus and as a result is the home address of thousands of OSU students. But University housing figures indicate fewer students choose to live near campus. Dilnavaz Cama watches student housing trends as part of her job at OSU’s Off-Campus Student Services. She says areas east of High Street and south of 11th Avenue have lost between a quarter and a third of their student population during the past three years.

“The numbers show in past years we had close to around 10,000 students in the core university district area, and now we’re finding that number is closer to upper seven lower eight thousands,” Dilnavez says.

Dilnavaz says the perception with students and many parents is that the University District area is a little more dangerous than in past years. The decline in student residents living near campus comes at time when neighborhood revitalization efforts are showing results. Much of the Campus Gateway Project has opened near the corner of 11th and High. The project features a movie theatre, book stores, restaurants, and some university offices. Campus Partners spokesman Steve Sterrett questions the accuracy of numbers showing a sharp drop in the number of students living near campus. He thinks the loss is less severe, but he acknowledges more students are giving up the convenience of an urban neighborhood for fear of crime.

“I think the perception of crime is real,” Sterrett says. “It does have an impact on students choosing to live in these neighborhoods.”

Fewer students in near campus neighborhoods has direct effects on some campus area businesses. Saturday’s Salon fronts on High street near 14th Avenue. “They chose to open a location on campus because of the massive student population here,” says Saturday’s manager Kate Oppermann. She says her business is 95 percent students, and she’s already noticed a decline in neighborhood foot traffic.

“The majority of people we get are people coming from class from the west side of the street. And then on the east side of the street, when there are no classes, business definently drops off,” Oppermann says.

Campus Partners works with the University and the city of Columbus to reduce crime and eliminate blight as part of its plan to keep business profitable and residents safe. The improvements are welcomed by junior nursing student Joe Byer, who says he’ll keep his apartment on Chittenden while he completes his degree, even though crime remains a neighborhood problem.

“I’ve had my car broken into a few times. There’s been a few people we know have been robbed in the back alleys, held up (with guns). Sometimes they’ll show the gun, sometimes they’ll just say ‘I have a gun.’”

Byer works at University Hospitals and most of his classes are on south campus. He says “you’ve gotta take the good with the bad.”