Kelsey Volkmann, The Examiner
2007-11-08 08:00:00.0
Current rank: Not ranked

BALTIMORE -

In a post-Virginia Tech world, colleges shouldn’t rely solely on text-message alerts as the “silver bullet” for notifying students of emergencies, security experts told government planners, university administrators and business executives Wednesday.

“Our chief of campus police says text messages are a joke and a feel-good measure,” Cheryl Elliott, spokeswoman for the Institute for Infrastructure and Information Assurance at James Madison University in Virginia, told attendees of an emergency-preparedness conference in Baltimore.

“It’s only a part of a lot more avenues and a problem if you are relying only on that.”

At James Madison, only half of the 16,000 students signed up for cell-phone notifications, a trend reflected at schools across the nation.

Sending frequent text messages can dilute their use in the case of a real emergency, said Robert Lang, head of security at Kennesaw State University in Georgia.

“If we send out alerts telling students where to go, the bad guys can get them, too, and guess where they’re going?” Elliott said.

Not all cell phones have text-message capabilities, said Robert Price, director of the Center for Homeland Security at Towson University, who attended the conference.

Companies peddling text alerts fail to mention the hidden costs associated with them, which can charge a school of 20,000 students $2,000 each time, Lang said.

In addition to text alerts, campuses could use sirens, e-mails, tree phones, two-way intercoms, digital signs, radio announcements and other means to reach students and professors, panelists said.

JMU sent out e-mails when a female student got in a car with an acquaintance who drove to another town to assault her, Elliott said.

Schools should create teams that monitor complaints about students acting bizarrely, Lang said.

At Kennesaw State, a student threatened another Virginia Tech if the school didn’t stop charging for parking but the school’s monitoring team investigated and found he was only trying to impress a girl, said Lang, who has also coordinated security for the Olympic games.

More than 500 government officials, safety industry representatives and educators from across the mid-Atlantic region attended the “All Hazards Forum,” which continues today.

kvolkmann@baltimoreexaminer.com