High-Tech Tools Help Campuses Avert Crises

When a masked freshman came to campus at St. John’s University with what police said was a loaded rifle sticking out of a bag, the school alerted students via cell-phone text messages within 18 minutes.

And when a suicidal gunman was reported to be on the loose at the University of Wisconsin, the school sent out mass e-mails and took out an ad on Facebook to warn students.

As the school year starts, colleges around the country are applying the lessons of Virginia Tech and using high technology to get the word out fast in a crisis.

“No one thought that we would be testing this latest technology this quickly for an emergency,” said James Pellow, the executive vice president of St. John’s.

The 20,000-student Roman Catholic school in Queens activated its new text messaging system three weeks ago. The scare came on the same day that the student paper ran a front-page story about the system, under the blaring headline: “In case of emergency.”

This week’s incidents at St. John’s and UW-Madison – both of which ended without bloodshed – underscore how campus security has changed since Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 people on the Virginia Tech campus in April.

Mr. Cho shot his first two victims just after 7 a.m. More than two hours later, he massacred 30 people in a classroom building across campus. It wasn’t until 9:26 a.m. that the school sent the first e-mail to students and faculty. An investigative panel concluded that lives could have been saved if alerts had been sent out earlier and classes canceled after the first burst of gunfire.

Since then, hundreds of schools have installed text-messaging systems to communicate with students.

Omnilert, a company based in Leesburg, Va., saw its business surge after the Virginia Tech rampage. It is now supplying more than 250 colleges and universities around the country with instant messaging capability through a system called e2Campus.

St. John’s purchased its inCampusAlert text-messaging system from the California company MIR3 Inc. over the summer, also in response to the Virginia Tech slayings.

The system sends a message not only to cell phones, computers and PDAs, but also to digital signs in public places such as student unions or dorms.

“Nearly every major college and university in the country is either in the process of implementing a text message warning system or seriously considering do it,” said S. Daniel Carter, the senior vice president of Security on Campus, a nonprofit organization based in King of Prussia, Pa., that pushes for safer college campuses.

School officials haven’t completely given up more traditional ways of communicating with students.

Last week, after two students were shot and wounded at Dela-ware State University, campus police and residence hall advisers knocked on doors and told students to stay in their rooms, and warnings were posted on the school’s Web site and at dorms.

But it is clear that schools are taking advantage of every innovation they can.

In Wisconsin, officials paid the popular social networking site Facebook $100 to post a flier on the UW-Madison social network. The ad asked users to click on a link for an update on the campus emergency. That took them to the university’s home page, which carried the latest information on the search for a suicidal gunman. Authorities still had not located the man as of Thursday.

In the St. John’s incident, text messages were sent so quickly that a student who helped subdue the suspect felt his cell phone vibrate with the information while he was restraining the gunman.

Originally published by Associated Press.

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