Ready, set, respond: the Virginia Tech tragedy prompted college and university leaders to plan in new ways for responding when the unexpected happens. A year later, how much progress has been made in bridging crisis communication gaps?

University Business, April, 2008 by Michele Herrmann

Currently, 94 percent of the college's 1,900 students and a vast majority of its 800 faculty and staff have registered with Connect-ED to receive emergency alerts.

Another approach being taken is considering the "what-ifs" that occur while trying to send out messages during a crisis. If a website crashes, there is an automatic backup website available, says Carey, "but it takes several hours for it to come up, and we're looking at whether we can speed that up."

If time allows, an emergency response team would meet and decide to use Connect-ED and draft a message; if not, the director of campus safety would be authorized to send out a message. There are talks now about which other officials should have access, too. "You want to set up checks and balances that we use the system well, but you also want it to be very flexible and able to respond to situations as they emerge," says Carey. "You can't prepare for everything, but I think we're in much better shape in terms of emergency response and communication than ever before and that does give me a good feeling."

PUTTING EFFORTS INTO ACTION

With emergency response, administrators have experienced incidences this past year that meant putting plans to practice.

Officials at Lynchburg College (Va.), located about two hours from Virginia Tech, put its new early alert warning system from Federal Signal to the test one night in January when a 911 call came from someone in a bathroom of the Tate Hall residence about an alleged hostage situation.

Officials sounded an early alert siren, the campus went into a lockdown mode, and the e-mail notification system went into operation. The Lynchburg Police Department SWAT team surrounded the residence hall and shortly after conducted a room-to-room sweep. The incident turned out to be false.

The night of the Tate incident, according to President Kenneth Garren, a lot of communication issues arose: how to help police correctly identify students and officials; when to send notices out via e-mail; and what to do when the call center is overwhelmed by incoming calls from concerned parents.

"The best thing I did all night was to go back and forth from the command post to the students," remembers Garren. "Every time there was anything [new], I went back to that group." He'll likely never forget the student who said, "As soon as we saw you here, we knew that everything was going to be okay."

At the University of Colorado at Boulder, the opportunity to put crisis plans in action on the first day of classes was unfortunately an actual violent act. With the time recorded at 9:43 a.m., a middle-aged man who had been a temporary university employee randomly stabbed a freshman in the neck on campus at the University Memorial Center. Officials issued a text message at 10:20 a.m. to Rave Alert subscribers saying the suspect was in custody and that more information would be posted later on a school website.

Just prior to that, administrators had selected Rave Wireless' Rave Alert, which sends broadcast text messages to subscribers' cell phones. Students, faculty, and staff register their mobile phone numbers online. On the day of the incident, this message got out to 1,300 registered members.