Emergency alert system to be tested

Julianne Herts Assistant News Editor

The Office of Computing and Information Services (CIS) will perform a campus-wide test of its new Crisis Communication System on April 2. The system will be used to send an automatic message to members of the College community in case students and faculty need to take shelter, evacuate an area or go to a secure location.

Vice President of CIS Bret Ingerman and Vice President of College Relations Susan DeKrey have worked throughout the year with their respective staffs and other College officials to prepare the new e-mail and text-messaging system.

“The campus Emergency Response Group, a broad-based group representative of many areas of the campus, felt that especially after the tragedies at Virginia Tech and other campuses, Vassar needed a multi-faceted strategy for communicating with the campus should there ever be a crisis here,” said DeKrey. “We saw that in some instances a high-tech system that could quickly be used to e-mail, text and phone people on campus was important.”

After researching a variety of alert systems, CIS chose a host system called Alert Find, produced by the company Message One. A number of schools, including Middlebury College, rely on Message One for crisis communication, while other institutions employ similar alternatives. Dutchess Community College, for example, uses e2Campus, a text messaging alert system, while the University of California at Berkeley continues to alert the campus community by sounding a loud siren when emergencies arise.

In order to be able to send alerts to the Vassar community, CIS worked with Alert Find’s technical support team to copy contact information from Banner Online onto the new host program and add information from a Web-based form, which requested contact information from students and faculty in Fall 2007. To keep information up-to-date, the CIS team uploads new information onto the server each week.

Vassar’s system will be tested twice in April and then once during every subsequent semester. It has already successfully been tested via various messages sent to the College President, Senior Officers and members of the Emergency Response Team. The tests in April will assess the system’s ability to send out text message alerts to all student and faculty, and will test whether students and faculty information has been correctly put into the system. The tests will also familiarize students and faculty with crisis messages.

Though the system can transmit voice messages, text messages will be used because students and faculty members are usually more likely to have access to their cell phones to receive a text message than to their dorm phones to receive a call. Text messages are also faster to transmit, according to Ingerman.

“While it is not technologically possible to guarantee delivery of every text message—the cell phone companies cannot guarantee this—it is our goal to deliver text messages to a critical mass of people,” he said.

The number of people who sign up for text message alerts is, at many universities, a small proportion of the community. The low sign-up rate, combined with the brevity of text messages, has motivated school officials at Vassar and across the nation to use other means of communication as well.

“No one method alone was going to be adequate,” explained DeKrey. “With that kind of plan in mind, we took stock of the existing means of communication—campus-wide e-mailing, for example, and personal communication within the residence halls—and added a new system that allows us to communicate in a broadcast fashion, through text messages, phone calls and voice mail, to everyone on campus for whom we have contact information.”

After the test, students who did supply their contact information but did not receive the message will be able to contact the Registrar; employees will be able to contact the Human Resources office. By checking the information of those who do not receive the message, CIS will determine whether or not the contact information on file is accurate.

The Office of College Relations and CIS will also note the number of text messages received. This information, in addition to feedback from students and faculty, will allow them to gauge the effectiveness of the alert system.

CIS encourages all students and faculty to update their contact information so that the test will be successful and the campus will be prepared in the case of a real emergency.

“We have prepared in advance a number of basic messages that could be sent immediately in the case of, for example, a violent incident on campus, extreme weather or a hazardous environmental condition,” said DeKrey. “Those would be followed up with more details through a variety of channels as details became known.”

It is, however, important to note that having such a system in place does not necessarily mean that students and faculty will be informed promptly of violent incidents on campus. Dolores Stafford, former president of the International Association of Campus Law, noted in the Chronicle of Higher Education that “The complete focus now is on how fast can you communicate with your campus community. And the trouble is, sometimes you don’t have anything to say,” she said.

A lack of information has indeed prevented college officials from using their security systems in the past. The University of Chicago uses cAlert, which can send text, e-mail, and voice messages, as well as a Safety Awareness Alert System that reports via e-mail on high-profile or violent crimes. Yet on Nov. 19, 2007, when University of Chicago graduate student Amadou Cisse was killed half a block away from the campus at 1:26 a.m., university officials did not send out an emergency alert until 10:40 a.m. According to the school’s Web site, administrators did not want to alert the campus until they had more information about the crime.

Less than a month later the University of Northern Illinois used their security alert system promptly. On Feb. 14, 2008 at about 3 p.m., a gunman entered a lecture hall and killed six students before committing suicide. A campus alert went out at 3:20 p.m. advising students and faculty to stay indoors and avoid the area where the shootings had taken place.

Security systems may also help schools to avoid violent attacks altogether. According to a Sep. 28, 2007 article in The New York Times, “The Day After, Warning System Draws Wide Praise at St. John’s,” officials at St. John’s Univerisy in Queens sent out a text message alert when they discovered that a gunman was on campus. The gunman, a 22-year-old student, was arrested before anyone was harmed. Students and faculty remained in lock-down for the entire duration of the incident.

Vassar’s emergency response system is similar to those used at the University of Queens and the University of Chicago. The success of a text messaging system can vary greatly by school and situation.

Yet Vassar officials hope that, at the very least, the new emergency response system will increase the odds that a critical information will go out to students promptly.