Last month’s responses to the report of an armed man on the Virginia Tech campus showed how drastically colleges have upgraded their mass-alert systems since a gunman killed 32 fellow students and faculty at the Blacksburg campus four years ago. When Cho Seung-Hui shot his first two victims on April 16, 2007, the university waited more than two hours to send an email of warning to the campus community.
On Aug. 4, 2011, three teenagers thought they spotted a man carrying a handgun at the school. Even though no such man or weapon was ever found, students and staff were alerted by text messages, Twitter posts, emails, sirens and flashing message boards within a half-hour of campus police being called.
Virginia Tech is not alone. Colleges around the D.C. region have upgraded their mass-alert systems over the past four years to deliver messages faster and across more platforms. Now, schools say they’re looking increasingly to newer tools like social media and location-based services to supplement more traditional methods.
| Alert upgrades |
| A sample of area colleges’ responses to the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre: |
| » University of Maryland: Added text alerts, location-based text and email messages, electronic message boards. |
| » American University: Extablished text- and email-alert system. |
| » Howard University: Upgraded vendor for text, email and phone systems. |
“We’re able to reach many more people in a shorter period of time,” said Leroy James, Howard University’s police chief. Since 2007, he said, the school upgraded its alert system to send texts, voicemail and email messages faster.
Many schools, like Howard, had systems in place or in development before Virginia Tech, but fast-tracked enhancements after the shootings. Mass-notification service providers say they’ve seen a huge increase in business.
In 2007, just 35 colleges were using Omnilert, a company that develops mass-notification systems. Now, more than 800 use its services, said CEO Ara Bagdasarian.
Text messaging via cell phone was viewed as a must-have after Virginia Tech — the school was widely criticized for not having such a system — but in recent years, schools have realized texts alone are insufficient.
Cell phones are useless to students who have them off, are in a building with poor reception or made a mistake registering their phone number, Virginia Tech spokesman Mark Owczarski said. That’s why, he said, the university also uses emails, electronic message boards in public areas, social media, sirens, website updates and other methods during emergencies, including the Aug. 4 incident.
“You never reach a point where you stop trying to do more,” Owczarski said. The school has expanded its presence on Facebook and Twitter, and several thousand people began following Virginia Tech on Twitter the day of the August incident, he said.
The University of Maryland is using Nixle, an alert system that lets public safety agencies send text and email messages about incidents near specific locations.
“I can really localize where those messages are going,” Capt. Marc Limanski said.
Colleges have also ramped up emergency planning. At Catholic University, Public Safety Director Thomasine Johnson’s office houses several-inch-thick binders that outline response plans for situations from shooters to pandemics. The university conducts full-scale drills twice a year to let new students and staff know what to expect.
“In an emergency, we don’t have to figure out what we’re going to do,” Johnson said.
Experts say such planning is crucial.
“All the technology in the world will not make a difference if there’s not an underlying policy on how to use it,” said Daniel Carter, director of public policy for the nonprofit Security on Campus. “If Virginia Tech had text messaging in place, but still waited two hours to send a message, it would not have made much of a difference.”
Local students said alert systems and old-fashioned word-of-mouth keep campuses informed. Mariel Murphy, a George Washington University junior, said she gets email alerts about crimes, and news spreads fast.
“I’m not afraid of not finding out about something,” she said.
