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

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