Colleges Plan For Security As School Starts

Aug 21, 2007 4:05 PM

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.

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, reports the Spokesman-Review.

The most common approach seems to be two-pronged: a combination of siren or speaker systems and new text-messaging networks. That combination is in place at Washington State University (WSU), and it's on the way at Whitworth University, Spokane, Wash.

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.

"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.

"Virginia Tech brought everything right to the table and made us rethink how vulnerable we are on campuses," Gary Livingston, Community Colleges of Spokane (CCS) chancellor, tells the Spokesman-Review.

At CCS, security officers were decentralized and given offices on each campus, to put the decision-making closer to the students. At University of Idaho, following a tabletop exercise about an "active shooter," the school developed a plan for how it will lock down the campus in the event of an emergency.

Several schools plan increased safety campaigns to students and faculties this fall, and campus officials emphasized that such campaigns are more broadly focused than the "active shooter" scenario. "Although we certainly want to plan for a Virginia Tech type situation, we want people to be aware that there are more likely scenarios," says Jeff Hart, security director at Gonzaga University.

One effective way to reach a lot of people in an emergency is an outdoor siren or speaker system. At WSU, plans for such a system were under way before Virginia Tech, but that incident speeded up the process, says Chris Tapfer, the school's emergency management coordinator.

WSU spent $114,000 on the new system, which includes clusters of speakers atop five buildings and the ability to combine sirens with messages. The speakers were tested last week, as students flooded back for the new school year. "This is a completely new system," Tapfer says. "The new sirens are nothing like the old sirens we're used to from the old days, the air-powered windup."

WSU also is adopting a "direct-contact" system of sending out text messages to cell phones and other devices. People would need to register their cell phone numbers with the system, and WSU is urging students, faculty and staff to do so, he says.

EWU's new text-messaging system is similar, and officials there will push students to register as well. Gasseling said that while Eastern doesn't have an outdoor loudspeaker system, it has a network of speakers in each building, which can be used for preprogrammed or live messages.

Whitworth University is adopting a combination of new technologies. A new text-messaging system will be in place for fall classes, and a series of six to eight speakers will be put up on campus, spokesman Greg Orwig says.

At University of Idaho, bids for an emergency notification system have gone out and the school is expected to adopt a system that may include text messaging and loudspeakers.

College officials say the new systems will help keep people safer on campus, but they also say no system is perfect. Livingston, the CCS chancellor, notes the difficulties of controlling a college campus, with buildings spread around, widely varying schedules and adult students who are largely free to do what they want.

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