Campuses on high-tech alert
Posted: Wednesday, April 16, 2008 7:59 AM by Alan Boyle
Dan Gill / AP file |
Megan Verbeck checks her cell phone for a new text
message while working on projects at Ellis Library at
the University of Missouri at Columbia.
|
One year ago, the Virginia Tech shootings served as a wake-up call for campus security experts. Today, colleges and universities are wide-awake - and plugged in to the possibilities afforded by Web-capable, GPS-aware cell phones and other gizmos.
High-tech alert systems have been used so much over the past year that young lives have surely been saved. So what's the next step? The experts say some campuses have to work on their low-tech alert methods, such as sirens and updated versions of the good old public address system.
Last year, gunman Seung-Hui Cho roamed over the Virginia Tech campus for two hours before an e-mail notification about the shootings went out to students. Cho began by killing two students in a dormitory, and then moved on to a classroom building where he killed 30 more and took his own life. The initial communications snags spurred sharp questions about the university's security system - and sparked a nationwide re-examination of campus security measures.
Hundreds of schools have upgraded their security alert networks, often turning to electronic systems that can send out text alerts to thousands of students' cell phones. The schools pay $1 to $4 per enrolled student to have the systems hooked up, and students generally have to pay a small cost per message.
Before Virginia Tech, colleges and universities were reluctant to broadcast word of "any kind of negative activity," said Bryan Crum, spokesman for Omnilert, a Virginia-based company that provides alert systems for more than 500 campuses through its e2Campus service.
"Now it's a complete 180-degree change, where people are immediately sending out these kinds of alerts," Crum told me. "The schools are using it for everything from bomb threats to chemical spills, for on-campus shootings and off-campus shootings. They are not afraid to use it."
Not every campus crisis ends happily, as the tale of February's shooting spree at Northern Illinois University illustrates. But other case studies show how mass-notification systems can quickly alert students to stay out of harm's way:
- Last September, St. John's University in New York put out mass e-mails and text messages to warn students about a masked freshman who brought a rifle on campus, just three weeks after the notification system was installed. The system "worked like a charm," New York City Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said afterward.
- In February, Ferrum College in Virginia activated its alert system after a member of the housekeeping staff reported seeing a man walk into a residence hall with a gun. The campus went into a lockdown and police conducted searches, but no gunman was found.
- This month, lockdown notices were issued via text and e-mail alerts at Millersville University in Pennsylvania. "They basically sent out an APB [all-points bulletin] for a wanted individual," said Omnilert's co-founder and president, Ara Bagdasarian. "Students got the text message and called police with the location of the person, and they were able to get the guy right away."
- Last week, Montclair State University in New Jersey issued text and e-mail alerts after finding a handwritten note that threatened on-campus shootings. No trouble erupted - but Karen Pennington, the university's vice president for student development and campus life, told me the incident demonstrated that the system worked "very, very well."
Even before Virginia Tech, Montclair State was phasing in a program to give all incoming students a Rave cellular phone that's hooked up to receive instant alerts and provide GPS tracking. So far, 6,000 of the university's 17,000 students are on the system, and in a couple of years every student will have a Web-capable GPS phone, Pennington said.
"We never had any idea that we would be using campus notification in this way," she said. "We were thinking more about weather emergencies and that sort of thing."
The GPS feature, however, is aimed directly at campus safety. With Rave's "Mobile Guardian" system, students can turn on passive tracking for specified time periods ranging from 15 minutes to two hours. At the end of that period, they'll be prompted to turn off the location-tracker, or extend their time. If a student fail to take either action, or hits a panic button, the police are notified immediately - and a patrol could be sent to the GPS location.
Pennington said the high-tech phones are working great, but now she's looking into how to beef up low-tech methods of campuswide communication. Some of the newer campus buildings have a fire-alarm system that allows for voice announcements, but she said the university may have to put in sirens or loudspeakers to reach students and staffers who don't get emergency messages by phone.
"We continue to look at additional ways to get notifications out, because not everybody is doing the same thing at the same time. ... Do we completely revamp our system? Do we put in some other kind of system? Those are the discussions we're having," she said.
What about low-tech alerts?
Those are the kinds of discussions every school should have, said Chris Blake, associate director and campus preparedness project director for the International Association of Campus Law Enforcement Administrators. This week, the association will unveil its blueprint for safer campuses in the wake of the Virginia Tech shootings.
"Colleges and universities should have an array of means and methods to disseminate emergency alerts," he told me. "If they're going to purchase a mass-notification system, they should have multiple means of dissemination - high-tech means as well as low-tech means, like loudspeakers and public-address systems. It's best not to put all your eggs in one basket."
More than 100 schools have signed on for campuswide speaker and siren systems since the Virginia Tech shootings, USA Today reported this week.
There's another low-tech issue that colleges and universities are facing, Blake said: "They're really facing a challenge getting the students to opt in to a mass-notification system."
In February, The Associated Press reported that Omnilert's average text-alert signup rate for students, faculty and staff was just 39 percent - and that four in 10 students at Virginia Tech had not signed up for text alerts.
Omnilert's Crum pointed out that those figures don't account for other notification methods, such as e-mail and Web alerts. He also noted that newly signed-up schools would bring down the average, since they're starting from zero. Nevertheless, he acknowledged that getting signed up for alerts isn't as easy as it could be - and that's by design.
Crum noted that the cell-phone industry requires users to "double opt-in" when they sign up for computer-issued alerts. "The cellular telephone industry doesn't want what happened to e-mail to happen to texting," he explained. "They don't want spam. ... We are trying to follow the best practice of those rules."
What's a parent to do?
One of the bits of advice that Blake would give to students (and, by the way, to their concerned parents) is to make sure they're fully signed up to receive school alerts. Students can usually take care of that task from their password-protected campus Web pages.
Some parents and prospective students just might start judging campuses based on their approach to campus safety. For years, federal law has required colleges and universities to disclose information about campus crime (which is available in a searchable database), and this year Reader's Digest ranked 135 schools on campus safety and security. The 30 top-ranked schools all had mass-notification systems.
"The big thing is that having an emergency notification system has become the standard, and is expected," Omnilert's Bagdasarian said. "A year ago, that was not the case."
Even if you're not a college student anymore, mass notifications may be coming to a cell phone near you - if you want them to. Just last week, federal regulators approved a plan to create a nationwide, voluntary emergency alert system, and the service could be in place by 2010.
What about troubled students?
So far we've just been talking about getting alerts when an emergency has already begun - but what can campus authorities do to head off the violence before they start? This report rounds up what colleges and universities are doing to deal with troubled students, based on the lessons learned from the Virginia Tech.
At this week's National Campus Security Summit, Princeton campus police chief Steven Healy said it was "absolutely essential" for schools to develop plans for assessing potential threats. And Jerald Block, a psychiatrist who teaches at Oregon Health and Science University, agreed that it's important to recognize the warning signs of campus violence.
Block, who stirred up some controversy last month for suggesting that Internet addiction should be classified as a form of mental illness, is chairing a symposium on campus violence at the American Psychiatric Association's annual meeting next month - and he pointed out that colleges and universities are already moving toward wider sharing of students' mental-health records.
"In terms of psychiatry, that's very dramatic," he told me.
Block has one more suggestion for assessing students who may be suspected of planning future violence: Regard their computers as "significant others" - hard-wired witnesses who could be just as valuable as flesh-and-blood friends. He said the computer files are likely to provide insights into a potential shooter's plans and motives.
Block noted that the gunmen in the Virginia Tech case and the Northern Illinois case both removed the hard drives from their computers before their rampages.
"What that means to me is that the computer is extremely important to these shooters - why, we don’t know," Block said. "Effectively, it's like a significant other to them, and they want to destroy that along with themselves when they die."
Update for 10:15 a.m. April 17: You'll find some great comments below, including some thoughts from Tom Carter at Northern Illinois University about how the mass alerts might not be as useful as you'd like to think, and from Valcom's Dennis Causey about how his company's speaker systems are not as "low-tech" as I implied.
Brett Sokolow, president of the National Center for Higher Education Risk Management, also got back to me and noted that colleges and universities are having to deal with mass-alert fatigue. He recalled the case of one university that sent out a tornado alert at 2 a.m., and then found that 1,700 students who enrolled in the alert system "disenrolled" because of the middle-of-the-night disturbance.
"So actually we're finding something of a backlash to how often these systems are used," he said.
Sokolow also saw a lot of value in higher-tech speaker systems - where an amplified voice message can be passed along. A plain old siren is less useful, he said: "Nobody has any idea what the sound is for a tornado vs. a shooter."
