Although many colleges and universities have been installing or updating their emergency notification systems for students, faculty and staff since last April’s shootings at Virginia Tech, technology can’t fix one problem: not everyone who’s eligible for the emergency alerts wants them.
In a random check of five schools in the U.S., participation rates range from about 31% at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) to about 50% at New York University and at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. Boston College and Florida State University logged in with much higher participation rates — about 68% and 85% respectively.
After the Feb. 14 shootings at Northern Illinois University left five students dead and 18 others injured in DeKalb, Ill., the issue of emergency notification systems is again a focus on school campuses. Officials at the school could not be reached for comment or details about their own on-campus alert systems in the wake of last week’s shootings. But school officials elsewhere detailed efforts to get students, faculty and staff members to add their names, cell phone numbers and e-mail addresses to notification systems now in place.
Participation has been something of a challenge, however.
“People know [shootings and other emergencies] happen, but they don’t want to dwell on it,” said Major Jim Russell, public information officer for the Florida State University (FSU) Police in Tallahassee. At FSU, rather than having students and faculty opt-in, the school automatically includes them in the FSU ALERT system, meaning they have to opt-out if they don’t want to participate, Russell said. “That makes them stop and think about it.”
About 39,420 students, faculty and staff out of some 46,000 who are eligible are included in the FSU system. Emergency notifications are sent out at the school through text messages, e-mail, the school’s Web site, an AM radio station and voice-mail. Many of the school’s emergency systems were installed in response to a rough hurricane season in 2005, with additional upgrades made after the Virginia Tech attacks.
David Burns, emergency manager at UCLA, said that although his school has been upgrading its emergency notification systems since the Virginia Tech shootings, little can be done about the low 31% participation rate in the BruinAlert system. By signing up for BruinAlert, recipients can get text messages on their cell phones and other devices such as PDAs in the event of a campus emergency. All students with UCLA e-mail addresses — the number ranges from 29,000 to 39,000 depending on the time of year — automatically get e-mails during emergencies.
“There’s nothing we can do to force them to join [the text message] system,” Burns said. “All we can do is tell them that there’s a critical need to be able to get such information. It’s a Catch-22. It’s a public education problem. It’s a problem emergency managers are trying to address nationally.”
Part of the problem is apathy, as well as students who say they are too busy with studying and exams to take the time to join, he said. The school “can get the word out fairly quickly” through a combination of text messages, AM radio broadcasts, e-mail and a cable TV system that allows emergency messages to be scrolled on every channel. “[But] the problem is that the majority of people on campus won’t get that message.”
One new notification option is a software applet being installed on computers, allowing users to get pop-up emergency alerts whenever they are online on the university’s network.
Also slated for installation within 90 days is a campus-wide emergency siren system, he said. “You’re going to get that message, whether you want to or not.” The new system will include sirens to get people’s attention and loudspeakers that detail the emergency.
Elizabeth Davis, a spokeswoman for the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, said that the school’s UT ALERT text messaging system was installed after the Virginia Tech killings, but had been discussed before those attacks occurred. Students and staff must sign up to join the system, she said; So far, about 15,600 have out of about 30,000 potential enrollees have actually done so.
“Every opportunity we have to encourage students…, faculty and staff to sign up, we use that,” Davis said. “We’ve really been pushing it.”
The school’s alert system allows university officials to send text messages to recipients in emergencies but only works on devices that can receive text messages. No voice-mails are issued, but officials are looking at whether landline phones should be included in the future, Davis said.
The school has used the UT ALERT system three times so far — for a weather emergency, to alert students to an off-campus armed robbery incident and for a bomb threat on campus. “For the most part, we were really pleased with it,” Davis said. “We had some cases where some people get [the text messages] at different times than others,” depending on their cell phone carriers.
Alerts, which are also placed on the school’s Web page, are followed up with a more detailed e-mail to all students and staff. “Those are helpful because with a text message, you only have so many characters” for a message.
The school is also buying a system that will create a network of blue emergency light poles that include speakers to notify students of emergencies, she said.
Kelly Franklin, a spokeswoman for NYU in Manhattan, said that about 20,000 of the school’s 40,000 students and 3,600 faculty and staff members are signed up for emergency text notifications. “We do feel very good about the numbers right now,” Franklin said. The school also uses an e-mail system in place for about a year now to send alerts to all students and faculty in the event of emergencies.
Other systems, such as loudspeakers, would be difficult because NYU is an urban campus, with space often leased on only one floor in a wide range of buildings, she said.
Students, especially freshmen, are encouraged to sign up for the alerts. “We’ve made a huge push to get people signed up,” Franklin said.
Jack Dunn, a spokesman for Boston College, said the school has been using a system that was installed after the Virginia Tech shootings, providing e-mail, text message and voice-mail alerts. Some 9,000 students and staff out of 13,200 potential users have signed up, he said. The system is still being tested and improved, with plans for the first system-wide test to be held in the next few weeks.
One issue is that such systems were typically designed for fewer people and are having to be stretched to work for colleges and universities, he said. “There is no perfect system,” Dunn said. “Everyone scrambled to purchase a technology that hadn’t been perfected after the Virginia Tech shootings. As colleges and universities have tested them, they have had mixed results. It’s not uncommon that messages only get to 40% of the recipients [with some systems]. All of the vendors, they’re experiencing the same difficulties.”
Because of these challenges, schools can’t rely on one single notification method, he said. At Boston College, officials also use the school’s Web site, a special BC/Prepared emergency preparedness Web site and a toll-free emergency call system . Officials are now considering the installation of an on-campus loudspeaker system.
“What we realize is that no university is immune to life’s difficulties,” Dunn said. “All we can do is to be as prepared as possible. We think that through these [methods] we are in a position to respond to the best of our abilities.”
