Emergency Notification Systems and Communication

Colleges and universities around the country, ever more mindful of campus safety, are installing outdoor sirens. The systems can blast spoken messages or tone alerts of danger—and one of the preset messages on many of the public-address systems warns: "There is a shooter on campus. Seek shelter immediately."

The rush to use text messaging as an emergency notification system fails to consider the weaknesses and potential hazards of this solution.

Saint Peter’s College responded to a bomb threat and evacuated the campus safely and efficiently thanks to close integration of human systems with IT.

This July 2008 survey is a critical component of the EDUCAUSE Center on Applied Research (ECAR) study of messaging and communication in higher education. It seeks to understand the provision, policies, use, and emerging trends related to telephony, mobile communications, e-mail and calendaring, and emergency notification systems in colleges and universities.

Citation for this work: EDUCAUSE Center for Applied Research. "Messaging and Communication Survey" (Survey Instrument). Boulder, CO: ECAR, 2008, available from http://www.educause.edu/ecar.

(Wally) Czerniak was attending a conference in Arizona where he was learning, among other things, about emergency-notification systems that can send text messages to cellphones - a method that a growing number of colleges have set up since the shootings last spring at Virginia Tech. But Mr. Czerniak still isn't sure whether such a system would have done much good in keeping people on campus updated as the crisis unfolded if it had been in place at Northern Illinois.

The Governor's Task Force on Campus Safety is focused on ensuring the safety of college campuses across Wisconsin. At the direction of Governor Jim Doyle, the Task Force is reviewing and compiling criteria for developing best practices from universities, colleges, and other higher education institutions in Wisconsin and across the nation. This information will be submitted to the governor and will serve as a resource for college administrators, law enforcement officers, and emergency preparedness officials.

This meeting will devote several hours to presentations and discussions regarding emergency notification systems on campus. This will include a panel of speakers from various campuses who are actively working on this issue, including Virginia Tech, and presentations by a select group of vendors. Also planned for the agenda is an update on municipal networks, 4G Wi Max and 911 capabilities on campus.

On April 16, 2007, a Virginia Tech student shot and killed 32 faculty and students and wounded 25 others before killing himself in an academic building on campus. The university is still dealing with the aftermath of the incident and expects it to be an ongoing concern for the foreseeable future. This session will encapsulate summaries of the IT-related lessons learned including the impact on the university's communication system; the notification issue; radio communications interoperability; the sheer logistics of accommodating the communications infrastructure and control center needs for a variety of emergency responders and law enforcement; identity management and privacy; and data preservation and computer forensics. Overriding all of these issues is the question of federal, state, and local policies and ways in which policy issues were encountered, confronted, and managed.

"After the April 16 massacre at Virginia Tech, the lesson many came away with was that e-mail alone won’t suffice to keep students informed about emergencies on campus. One solution widely regarded as both timely and technologically in sync with undergraduate habits was to use text messages to alert them to potential dangers. "

These are the results of testing done at the University of Central Florida by Dr. Lei Wei on four emergency notification technologies: Madahcomm, Athoc, ConnectED, and ViaRadio.