Universities seeking campus safety advice

Colleges nationwide are reassessing how to alert students during emergencies, with hundreds of schools seeking advice from campus safety experts Tuesday, the day after the Virginia Tech shootings. Private security firms also fielded scores of calls.

Students at Virginia Tech were informed of the violence via a mass e-mail about two hours after the first shooting, and about 20 minutes before the second.

Security experts Tuesday urged universities to use a variety of techniques to reach students. Many already deploy website postings, voicemail, public address systems, phone trees or even bullhorns. Some, such as USC, are considering text messages and podcasts.

“I’m sure there will be an additional urgency ... in lieu of what happened,” said Capt. David Carlisle of USC’s Department of Public Safety.

A 1990 federal law requires colleges and universities to notify students in a timely manner about any ongoing threat. The Jeanne Clery Act was named for a Pennsylvania college student who was raped and murdered in her dorm at Lehigh University in 1986. Her parents have charged that she should have been informed of the crime problems at the university.

“Given the circumstances of yesterday, it’s imperative that they issued that warning immediately, especially when you have a shooter loose on campus and they’re not in custody,” said Alison Kiss, program director of Security on Campus Inc., a nonprofit group.

Kiss said the organization had received at least 100 calls from colleges and universities seeking advice on the best way to issue timely warnings.

Because of the open nature of campuses and constantly changing technology, universities continually reevaluate their notification systems.

Fresno State is considering a cellphone message system that students could join. After a nonfatal shooting on campus last summer, the college notified students of the violence via e-mail, website postings and radio announcements.

In New Jersey, Montclair State University last year took an extraordinary step: It gave students cellphones that can receive campus-alert text messages and can contact campus police at the push of a button. If a student who presses the button cannot be contacted, police can use the global positioning satellite system along with private information that pops on their screen, to find the student.

“We realized that students constantly had cellphones with them, but they didn’t always have a computer around,” said Karen Pennington, vice president of student development and campus life at Montclair. “It’s their method of communication, and if we’re going to be able to communicate with students, we have to do it in the way they choose, not the way we choose.”

The Montclair system, which is among the first of its kind, is mandatory for freshmen -- about 4,000 of the school’s 12,000 undergraduates. The university plans to add all undergraduates and faculty to the system in phases to ensure sufficient coverage.

Montclair has sent mass text messages only a few times, once about a major power outage on campus last fall and another this spring when classes were canceled because of a snowstorm.

But texting thousands of students can present technical challenges -- at least at big campuses that don’t issue phones to students. At USC, about 31,000 students would have to provide cellphone numbers and ensure that those numbers were kept up to date with the technology department.

“It’s a very complex process with the student population. Having to gain access to the media they hold is the difficult part,” said David Beeler, a senior security system engineer at USC. “I don’t have everyone’s cellphone number” who goes to USC.

Companies such as Rave Wireless, which provides the Montclair alert system, had received more than 100 inquiries from schools since Monday. About 70 universities plan to start using Rave Wireless products next year, the company said, including the University of North Carolina and the University of Maryland.

MIR3, a company that also provides an emergency notification system with text messaging, received a dozen such calls. Among the callers were officials from the University of Michigan, the University of San Diego and UC San Diego.

UCLA is considering a system that will let the university text-message the student body. Company proposals are due May 9.

University officials, mindful that students already receive many e-mails and text messages, said they had been judicious about sending mass alerts.

“The mass e-mails are restricted to generally urgent messages or messages related to personal safety,” said Carlisle of USC.

He added that technology might not always work. “If something occurred like yesterday,” Carlisle said, “we may resort to our officers knocking on doors.”

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