Schools examine old, new options
Massachusetts public colleges, like their private and public counterparts around the nation, are mulling trying automated text messages, 1950s-style air raid sirens, and a variety of other techniques to warn students and faculty of an attack underway on their campus by a gunman or other campuswide emergencies.
Questions about how well students were notified during the mass shooting at Virginia Tech on Monday have led colleges to examine whether they are equipped to communicate to thousands of students quickly. Virginia Tech senior Seung-Hui Cho shot two people around 7:15 a.m., then two hours lapsed before his next attack, when he killed 30 others and then himself on the campus of more than 25,000 students.
Some Virginia Tech students said they didn’t get their first warning about a danger on campus until 9:36 a.m., around the time of the second set of shootings, and the alert came by e-mail. College officials said that before the e-mail, officials were also telephoning resident advisers in dorms and sending people to knock on doors to warn of the shooter.
‘‘A crisis like this reminds us all we need to keep looking at what we are doing and where the holes are,’’ said Mary Grant, president of the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts in North Adams and chairwoman of the Council of State College Presidents.
Massachusetts higher education leaders plan to meet with information technology specialists Monday to devise a comprehensive plan. They said a mix of new and old technology is essential because each system has pitfalls.
‘‘You need multiple ways to reach young people,’’ said Patricia Plummer, the state’s chancellor of higher education, who brought up the issue during yesterday’s regular board meeting. ‘‘You can get them on cellphones, but you also want to have a backup system.’’
Automated text or voice messaging can reach thousands of people within minutes, but students sometimes are asked to turn off cellphones in class.
And old-style public address systems or sirens could heighten a security risk by letting an intruder know the campus is on full alert and does little to warn students and faculty commuting to campus of the danger that awaits them.
Plummer said an automated voice and text messaging system could cost $20,000 a year for each of the 29 campuses. The system, which was being tested out by a few campuses this year, could notify 20,000 people within 10 minutes. Plummer said she will seek money from the Legislature for the system.
Plummer didn’t have a price tag for equipping campuses with sirens and public address systems. Some campuses have that technology, although they may not have enough of it to reach the entire campus.
At the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, officials are discussing how best to use the school’s public address system, which is in police cruisers. One question is: If all police are needed to respond to an event, should any officers be spared to drive around in the cruisers to broadcast warnings or can a civilian assist?
Elsewhere in the nation, colleges are also considering loudspeakers on towers and cameras that detect suspicious activity.
Chuck Green, director of public safety at the University of Iowa, said school officials were discussing a new outdoor warning system a day before the Blacksburg shootings. The technology would allow for live voice announcements as well as prerecorded messages at Iowa, where a graduate student killed five people then shot himself in 1991.
Material from the Associated Press was included in this report. 