August 24, 2007—As colleges welcome back students for another academic year, they’ll also be putting some new security measures in place — some high-tech, some old-fashioned, according to an article in the Spokesman-Review, a newspaper in Washington state.
In the wake of the Virginia Tech shootings in April, college officials everywhere fielded calls from parents and students, reviewed emergency plans and systems, and added new tools to improve campus safety, says the article.
The most common approach seems to be two-pronged: a combination of siren or speaker systems and new text-messaging networks.
The general idea is that colleges need to expand the ways they contact students, faculty and staff in an emergency. Before this year, most colleges relied on e-mail alerts and Web page updates, notes the article.
“There is no one way you can reach everybody, so you better have a backup system, and a backup to the backup,” says Gary Gasseling, deputy chief of the Eastern Washington University (EWU) police force.
New equipment is only part of the equation. One much-discussed element of the Virginia Tech incident was the two-hour gap between the first shooting and the first university-wide notification. Over the summer, campus officials participated in a number of exercises intended to sharpen their decision-making skills during emergencies and consider how they would react in a similar “active shooter” situation.
College officials say the new systems will help keep people safer on campus, but they also say no system is perfect. For more information, visit SecuritySolutions.com, where a version of the article is posted.
