Md. college: Emergency text alerts to start soon

Prince George’s County (Map, News) - A text message-based emergency alert system likely won’t be ready when Prince George’s Community College begins classes next month but should be in place for students come “early fall,” a school official said this week.

Just weeks after the Virginia Tech shootings on April 16, then-PGCC President Ronald Williams said the school would be “moving quickly” on the system.

“The delay has simply been to figure out what is the best solution for us,” Joseph Rossmeier, vice president for technology services at the college, told The Examiner this week. “There are so many different products on the market place.”

According to Rossmeier, before settling on a third-party operating system that people can choose to register for, PGCC considered running its own system on campus and requiring all employees and students to subscribe to the service.

“If the power goes out on the campus or we have to vacate the campus for any number of reasons whereby our own computer center isn’t available, then [a PGCC-operated] solution isn’t very good,” he said.

Although Rossmeier said he expected students eventually would sign up for the alert system as part of registration, this year there will be a special sign-up process after registration.

Rossmeier expects the system will cost no more than $20,000 in the first year. Students, and eventually PGCC employees, will be able to receive emergency alerts via cell phones, pagers, PDAs and e-mail.

Within the next year, Rossmeier said, the college should also have Internet-based telephones in each of its approximately 230 classrooms and labs. Currently, he said, only about 10 percent of them have phones.

PGCC Police Chief Larry Walker said the school currently uses e-mail, telephone and voicemail for notification and said that the “system wasn’t adequate.”

dfowler@dcexaminer.com

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