Nick Valltos remembers the sound of scores of pagers going off all at once as he was beginning his police leadership lecture. “I thought something big must be going on,” he said. That something was September 11, 2001, and Valltos, College of Southern Maryland criminal justice instructor, was in Lafayette, La., with 30 SWAT (special weapons and tactics) officers.
“I called my family, raced to the airport and got the last rental car—a Civic. I told my wife to round up the kids and stay home.” During the 21-hour non-stop trip from Louisiana to Maryland, Valltos listened to the car radio for any news that might explain why two jets crashed into the World Trade Center towers and what might happen next.
Willette Onachila, of Lexington Park, remembers being on the phone with her sister-in-law when the second plane hit. “It didn’t seem real,” she said. Onachila doesn’t dwell on 9-11, but she does dwell on the idea that lapses in judgment can be deadly and that everything you do in the intelligence and security fields is important.
Over the past nine years Valltos worked to get CSM’s homeland security (HLS) associate’s degree program off the ground and Onachila is on schedule to be among the first graduates in the program this spring.
“Get on the usajobs.gov website and you will see at least a thousand homeland security related jobs. Every state, every city and county has a homeland security department coordinator. A HLS degree is one of those degrees that covers a myriad of careers with defense contractors, fire departments, law enforcement and private industry,” said Valltos.
CSM began developing its HLS degree program in 2003 under the direction of the late CSM Professor Ed Schauf who was the original program coordinator. “Ed saw the first homeland security classes of his project just before he died in August of 2011,” said Valltos.
“Ed and I went to DHS (Department of Homeland Security) and asked what qualifications they were looking for. We went to FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) and asked what training they were looking for. We knew that CSM’s established criminal justice and fire science programs would provide courses that fit homeland secur
