Ready To Respond

Jul 1, 2008 12:00 PM, By Mike Kennedy

Bujak: Do you want mass notification or a targeted notification to a certain building or group of individuals? Do you want the notification to be active or passive? A siren you hear whether you want to or not? With e-mail, you have to log in; with a phone, you have to answer. You have to look at speed versus accuracy. A siren is instantaneous, but the ability to say a whole lot with it is non-existent. What will be the urgency of the messages? With hurricanes, we have days to get prepared and make decisions. For an active shooter situation, you don't have the luxury of minutes or hours to get a message out. Who decides when the system is to be used? At Florida State, we have five pre-approved situations (such as flooding or a tornado) in which a message can be sent out. We didn't want to have a convoluted approval system that would take hours before a message could go out. Who needs to be notified? The faculty? Just one building? Only students?

AS&U/AC&SS: What are some of the other steps schools have taken to enhance the safety of their campuses?

Watring: We are working on how we treat people who are mentally ill. A lot of people are paying closer attention to at-risk behavior. Now, we have a student behavior task force. Every week, we meet with people from the counseling center, from student affairs, judicial folks, police offices and people from student health. We talk about whom we are having problems with. The counselors can't disclose some of the things they know, but if something comes to our attention, it usually is a matter of public record, and we can pass that on.

Bullard: Schools should look at using the social networks that students themselves have built. There's concern that students aren't signing up for a notification system, but when you actually shoot a message out there, it gets to a lot more people. It's like the old ‘tell two friends’ system except it's at the speed of light.

Hendee: You need to use a combination of everything. To be truly prepared, you need to have threat assessment tools on campus. When an individual is identified as a potential risk, we have a consultant that does a profile to determine the level of the threat.

Bujak: The [University & Colleges committee of the IAEM] is putting together a Higher Education Incident Management team that can come to the aid of other schools in the event of an emergency (e.g., helping to get a registrar's office reopened or classes rescheduled). People with administrative or facilities and maintenance experience who understand how business is done on a campus would be on this team, and schools can call on this team for assistance. The committee is also working on developing guidelines and best practices for college emergency management programs.

Since Virginia Tech, the attention on security has faded somewhat at the upper administration level, but at the worker-bee level, such as police, emergency management and campus counseling officials, we are still focusing on what needs to be done.

AS&U/AC&SS: What are some of obstacles schools face in enhancing their emergency management systems?

Bujak: We have a wish list of about $1.3 million. We want to move indoors with our public address system. We're looking at Voice-over-IP systems that we would use in our most populous buildings. We also want to extend our siren system to off-campus property. We have intramural fields that on a good night have 800 to 1,000 students using them, but they are 5 miles from campus and they're out of the range of our sirens.

Also, the cell phone infrastructure in Tallahassee isn't there. There aren't enough cell towers to handle the volume when we're trying to send 46,000 messages in a 450-acre area. It took us four hours. You might get a text message in a couple of minutes and the person next to you might not get it for a couple of hours. That's why redundancy and multiple systems are important.

Watring: We could always use more personnel. I'm sure that every campus in Missouri would like to have more personnel. We also are trying to get all colleges and universities in Missouri to have sworn police officers. We're still looking at things, like electronic billboards in each building that would post alerts and warnings.

Bullard: The mental health side of the house has not been adequately addressed. People are a little bit hesitant to get involved with that. With 58 schools and 800,000 students in the North Carolina community college system, it's harder to develop a consensus. You can turn the train, but it takes a while to turn it around. Also, in a community college system, we have a mostly commuter student population, and it's very difficult to keep track of everybody. In our system, whether campuses are large or small, they are tied in to their communities. You don't want to stymie the education process, which could happen if you lock down a campus like a prison.

Hendee: Out of 37,000 students, only 800 are residents on campus, making it more difficult to reach out. That's why we try to use the Web. We have also done about 45 presentations to students and parents.

AS&U/AC&SS: Is the focus on active-shooter incidents after Virginia Tech and Northern Illinois taking too much attention away from plans to address other types of emergencies?

Watring: In the police business, you have to be prepared for any eventuality. We need to know what to do if there's an active shooter, a natural disaster, a fire, an evacuation, tornados or floods; we need to know how to handle it.

Bullard: We remain focused on natural hazards. North Carolina as well as our sister Florida has been tested by hurricanes. You have four days notice, and there aren't a lot of excuses for not at least being able to do some things such as evacuation. You can make decisions a few days in advance. You're only as good as your planning efforts.

Hendee: I think with the way things have been emerging, campus violence is just another facet of the campus safety plan. It just dovetails into our emergency response plan.

Bujak: We (on the IAEM committee) find that a lot of schools and their emergency management systems are heavily centered on law enforcement. In California, Oregon, Washington (because of earthquake threats) and here in Florida, because of the hurricane threat, our approach is more all-hazard in nature.

Mike Kennedy, writer for AS&U magazine, can be reached at mkennedy@asumag.com

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