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Are Students Lulled Into a False Sense of Security with Messaging Systems?

Are colleges preparing students enough for shootings or other emergencies?

April marks the second anniversary of the tragic shootings that took place on the Virginia Tech campus in Blacksburg. April 16, 2007, is a date that holds tragic significance to the students, staff, friends and family who feel connected to Virginia Tech. It was the day Seung-Hui Cho took the lives of 32 people in the worst mass shooting in U.S. history. It was a transformational day for the Virginia Tech community, but the shootings also shed light on the need for higher education to participate in emergency management in newer, more organized roles.

Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine appointed a panel of experts to review the incident and Virginia Tech's subsequent response. The panel made more than 70 recommendations, from mental health legislation to gun control laws to incident response policies.

Any university official who read that report, no matter what institution they worked for, undoubtedly saw that significant work had to be done to prepare universities for an incident on the scale of the Virginia Tech shootings. Following the report's release, universities scrambled to make changes to their emergency response plans. Most of them did their best to make changes that were visible to their communities. This sharply increased the demand for alert and warning systems, and there was a predictable surge in the number of companies offering them. Whether dealing with sirens, scrolling message boards or text messaging systems, it's safe to say that nearly every U.S. university has installed or is installing a new messaging system for its campus.

 

Lulling Students

These installations, in many cases, have lulled students, staff and their families into a false sense of security. On a basic level, an inherent problem is that once an organization has the capability to send an emergency message, the organization still needs people who know what to say, when to say it and how to say it. Herein is the real problem with campus emergency management: Most colleges and universities still hesitate to address emergency management across all phases and make a real commitment to preparedness.

Nobody questions that there are daunting challenges when adopting emergency management best practices in an environment -- higher education -- that has never relied on them before. Universities are large and disparate organizations, with many departments seeking to fulfill their individual missions under the umbrella of a larger organization. Those departments face ever-shrinking budgets due to cuts at the state and federal levels. Concurrently they face growing student populations and increasing demands on their resources.

Understandably universities resist spending time and effort on planning for what most perceive to be highly unlikely -- a man-made or natural disaster. Many of the nation's larger universities, like Virginia Tech, resemble small cities -- they are mostly independent communities with their own populations and even their own public safety agencies. One might compare the state of preparedness efforts at these universities to the state of preparedness in small cities before and immediately after the 9/11 attacks. However, colleges and universities have an advantage over small cities because they have best practices developed through years of other communities' trials and errors that can be applied to their own emergency plans.

On one hand, the Virginia Tech shootings were a catalyst for colleges and universities to get serious about emergency management. It was easy to tune in to CNN or look at Facebook messages and see parallels between Virginia Tech and many other institutions. And because of the shocking and violent nature of the Virginia Tech incident, many institutions have focused their efforts primarily on security measures. But while the installation of central security offices, training of police officers, and the use of alert and warning

systems are surely not a misallocation of resources, the problem remains that the institutions are largely unprepared to deal with a disaster when it occurs. These are the things that can only be learned through training and exercises.

Clearly some organizations have been quick to exercise their plans and procedures -- as one might expect them to do. However, as we often see after any disaster, commitment to these efforts wanes as the political will to allocate funding diminishes as the sense of shock gradually decreases. Maintaining that commitment of preparedness in a university setting is no less challenging than it is in any other community. Unfortunately there are too few long-term grant opportunities to support emergency planning for higher-education institutions. Disasters of Virginia Tech's magnitude don't occur frequently enough to warrant an expectation of more available funding.

Colleges and universities are also unique because their populations, especially students, turn over at a greater rate than a normal community. A tragic event like the Virginia Tech shootings is a relevant and powerful motivator to make changes for those who experienced it firsthand. In reality, the majority of students move on from the community in four years, and they take with them the impetus to spark change.

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College students are part of the community and should be included in planning disaster preparedness exercises.

 

College and the Community

Nonetheless, our colleges and universities will continue to face the same hazards as the communities that surround them. For this reason, local and state emergency management officials must make themselves available to universities and share their field knowledge. Often a local college is seen as a potential invitee to a community exercise when, in fact, a college accounts for a significant percentage of the surrounding community's population. We must include higher-education institutions as key planners for training and exercises if we expect to reach a larger proportion of our populations.

Local officials often have the impression that colleges and universities in their jurisdictions are addressing training needs independently, and so they need not be included as key planners. While there are exceptions to this common problem, it's easy to see that the old "not-my-issue" attitude surrounding this aspect of planning still isn't dead.

When a local college or university is included in an exercise, it's commonly realized that the surrounding community and the campus may have separate emergency operations plans, with aspects that are in direct conflict. This isn't to say that state or local emergency managers are to blame. The point is, colleges and universities that are hesitant to expend resources on emergency management in the first place aren't likely to call their local emergency manager and ask to be included in the next training and exercise planning workshop. Someone must sidestep the old ways of thinking to include higher-education institutions and extend the first invitation. Most communities are happy to accept the benefits of having a college or university in town, such as the presence of a new research hospital, booming business during the school year and the jobs it creates. Therefore, communities also must accept the responsibility of the "town-gown" relationship in preparing as one, coordinated community.

Another interesting facet of U.S. campus preparedness is the increasing number of colleges and universities offering degrees in disciplines like disaster response, emergency management and homeland security. Some of the nation's brightest, forward-thinking minds are spending their time and tuition to study the very challenges facing the universities where they study. This is undoubtedly the higher-education community's most valuable resource for advancing preparedness. For example, a university that needs an updated emergency plan could likely find a Ph.D. student who's eager to develop such a

plan as part of a doctoral study. And a local college that's addressing emergency management for the first time makes a remarkably valuable case study for the students of any emergency management degree program.

This vast resource of knowledge and manpower that's being underutilized is a perfect example of the state of campus preparedness today. The need for university preparedness certainly exists, as was illustrated in April 2007 at Virginia Tech and again at Northern Illinois University in a February 2008 shooting that killed six. The knowledge gleaned from years of adapting best practices learned in every major U.S. disaster and the wisdom currently being taught in lecture halls exist separately. The creation of a reliable, consistent means of connecting the organizations in need with those that possess the knowledge remains an unmet goal.

U.S. colleges and universities -- the higher-education community at large -- exhibit all the characteristics of a community that's forced to face the reality, for the first time, of the need for coordinated planning and training. College administrators suddenly assigned these new responsibilities are frequently without direction. They haven't been indoctrinated into the emergency management life cycle. (Survey a few college presidents on what the Incident Command System is if you're not sure.)

There's little reason, two years after the Virginia Tech tragedy, for any college or university to be excluded from a community's preparedness efforts. We must all equally share the responsibility of protecting and preparing the higher-education community through inclusion and open lines of communication. After all, that's what coordinated preparedness is all about.