Bowie State University and Prince George’s Community College are improving emergency alert systems following the Virginia Tech shootings last month.
Prince George’s Community College officials said they soon will implement a text-message based alert system and are also considering installing a siren and campuswide intercom system.
Bowie State University, which already had a text-messaging system, has aggressively encouraged students, staff and faculty to sign up for the service and has purchased an intercom/siren system, campus police chief Ernest Waiters said Friday.
According to Waiters, of the 1,400 people who have signed up for the Bowie State text alerts, more than 50 percent subscribed after the Virginia Tech incident.
But Waiters said the siren/intercom system, which should be installed in two weeks, was important because “even today, a lot of people don’t have cell phones.”
He said, “We also found that in certain areas of the university we might have dead spots,” where people couldn’t receive text messages. The text alerts can go to cell phones, e-mail accounts, PDAs (hand-held computers) and pagers.
On April 16, Virginia Tech student Seung-Hui Cho shot and killed 32 students and teachers on the Blacksburg campus in two separate attacks.
The first attack occurred at about 7 a.m., but university officials didn’t send students e-mails and recorded messages on campus phones notifying them of the incident until more than two hours later. When the second attack occurred at about 9:30 a.m., the campus still hadn’t been locked down.
“Our notification system is pretty much the same regarding the process we use to notify people, which is our e-mail system, telephone, voice mail,” PGCC police Chief Larry Walker said Friday.
Following the Virginia Tech incident, Walker said, “We realized our system wasn’t adequate in terms of getting information out to the entire college community.”
Walker said the text service will be available to students, faculty, staff and possibly parents. He said he hopes the system will be in place “relatively soon.”
“We will be moving quickly on it,” outgoing PGCC president Ronald Williams said Thursday.
