To better notify students of impending danger, ETSU has set up several alert devices comprised of text message, e-mail and siren alerts.
David Collins, vice president for finance and administration, says these devices will help to alleviate campus tension, in regard to emergency situations.
“ETSU is a whole lot better place than it was just one year ago, about the time of Virginia Tech,” said Collins, referring to the April 16, 2007, shooting at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University that killed 27 students and five faculty members. “It’s amazing what we’ve accomplished in a year.”
ETSU’s alert texting system, GoldAlert, which has been in operation since Nov. 12, 2007, has Collins thinking things are moving pretty smoothly with small interruptions.
“We still have some people not receiving everything, but we’re looking into that,” he said.
Along with GoldAlert, the new installment of sirens and cameras on campus should help with attention toward safety, Collins hopes. After last month’s first trial run of the new sirens he thinks more could be done by ETSU to better confirm efficient safety measures on campus, but overall the school has a good thing started.
“Things seemed to go well. There were some issues about what people can hear. They are going to run some more tests soon. It works, which is the main thing we are working with right now.”
A couple of concerns, Collins said, with the execution of the new alert systems were: it was hard to hear the sirens last week because they only sounded outdoors; there are not enough cameras to monitor campus; and people are worried about being attacked with no way to lock down buildings or rooms. Although he would prefer that all worries be put to rest, Collins fears he cannot solve all concerns with campus safety.
“Easily locking down buildings and rooms would be great, but that would cost close to $4-5 million to access a system of that caliber,” he said. “We would certainly like to get more cameras, but every dollar we spend on preparedness is a dollar we don’t have for instruction of our students.”
Not all campuses have the same alert systems as ETSU. In fact, some universities are more advanced than ETSU. Collins doesn’t think this to be a measure of the amount of safety on ETSU’s campus, but mostly a matter of finances. Collins said it was hard to say whether we were ahead of or behind other universities, but that was mainly because of them having more money to spend.
“The upper tiers may have it better than the majority, but even Virginia Tech is just now implementing better safety precautions,” he said referring to top-tier universities.
The University of Kansas is one example of a school taking efficient preventative measures toward threat. Just last year, KU upgraded emergency notification systems at a cost of $600,000. Among those systems is a text alert system, similar to ETSU’s, a voice message fire alarm, a mass notification system and a 911 reverse system.
Ralph Oliver, chief of KU Public Safety, said that the reverse system will compliment the fire alarms, text alert system and other emergency notifications systems that the campus has installed. A reverse 911 system would allow Public Safety to create a message about a hazardous situation and send it to landline and cellular phones. The reverse 911 system could also move grouped or individualized messages to buildings and, also, send messages to some computer and PDAs.
“We’re trying to layer the emergency notification systems so we can reach as many people as possible when we need to,” Oliver said in an article published last August in the Oread, KU’s campus newspaper.
Many students have noticed the additions at ETSU, however, and few have complaints. The majority of students asked thought that steps towards improved safety were better than complete disregard. One student, senior Molly Kersten, thought that the actions taken were much more comforting than the horror stories she hears from some of her clients at Bailey’s Sports Grille and Bar, where she bartends.
“One girl was telling me about how she heard only by word-of-mouth that there had been a threat made on her campus,” she said. “The student that made the threat ended up in custody for questioning, but I remember her telling me how she was so creeped out by what could’ve happened and that no one seemed to know what was going on. Anything could happen and simply knowing the facts helps to calm a person down. Knowing ultimately could make a possibly very chaotic situation turn out to be something very handle-able.

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