Students help local business plan for safety

Pat Flynn wants to make Southeast Kansas a safe place to work. That’s part of the message his students will be taking to the advisory board for the Southeast Kansas Recycling Center in a presentation on Thursday.

Flynn is a technology management instructor in Pittsburg State University’s Kansas Technology Center. At 4:30 p.m. on Thursday, May 3, students in two classes that Flynn teaches will present a detailed safety plan to the recycling center’s board at a meeting in S-109 of the Kansas Technology Center.

“Safety is a critical issue for any company,” Flynn said, “but only about 30 percent of the companies in Southeast Kansas actually have a safety plan.”

Flynn said students in his Occupational Safety and Health and Industrial Safety classes put the plan together as a real-life learning experience. He said the students visited the center on Joplin Street in Pittsburg and identified potential safety issues. They used a standardized template to create a plan for the recycling center to address the safety issues they found.

In order to replicate a real-life setting, Flynn said, the students were organized to mirror a typical business setting.

Flynn said this is the second year that he has used this type of learning exercise with students and he is pleased with the results. Having the students work on a project with real application to an existing business is a real benefit, he said.

Flynn also thanked the recycling center for their willingness to work with the students.

“Hopefully, it is a benefit for them as well as the students,” Flynn said.

For more about Technology Management programs at PSU, visit their Web site at http://www.pittstate.edu/tm/.

---Pitt State---