Emergency Communication
by Mark Tarnacki
Staff Writer

Good communication is central to preventing more tragedies like the shootings at Virginia Tech and Northern Illinois Universities and would be key to a proper response if such an unthinkable scenario ever unfolded at Saint Michael’s. So say the security and student life officials behind emergency protocols that have been evolving rapidly at the college in recent months.

Peter Soons, director of safety and security, and Michael Samara, vice president for student affairs/dean of students, shared details of the Emergency Campus Communications Plan in February. They’ve helped develop the plan with cooperation from local police, emergency responders and alert-system experts.

Soons and Samara also have been meeting with groups on campus to talk about the plan and how everyone can help. They discuss ways that students, faculty or staff can be important players in emergency preparedness through vigilance about depressed friends or students and being on the lookout for bullying or other signals.

Samara said he felt compelled after the Northern Illinois incident occurred just before this year’s mid-year break to update the community on emergency planning once everybody returned. The college has had a comprehensive emergency response plan in place for many years, he said, but in Fall 2006 began to work on a “hostile intruder response guideline,” and with Soons taking the lead, developed a plan coordinated among several campus departments and local police.

Planning revolves around the questions “how do we best manage the situation, how do we verify reports and best manage the first couple of minutes,” he said.

Last fall the college contracted with Rave Wireless to provide a medium to be able to broadcast text messages to student cell phones in the event of a campus emergency. “We have had what we believe to be a very satisfactory response with more than 81 percent of our student population having registered and confirmed their cell phone numbers in the system. We ran a successful test of the system last week,” he said. Samara said that indicates that nearly every student has at least heard about and given some thought to emergency preparedness, though he’s hoping for even greater awareness.

Soons said text messaging is just one element of an overall emergency communications strategy that also includes e-mail, voicemail (limited utilization among students but very effective with faculty and staff), campus radio and TV, and the college website. “The student population was our initial focus for employing text messaging and we automatically registered them in the system,” he said.

In his campus-wide email, Soons invited faculty and staff to voluntarily register with Rave in order to be included in this medium of emergency communication. Those who register will receive future emergency communications through a combination of their cell phone, campus email and another email address. Registered Rave users will receive messages with updates and instructions from the college should an emergency take place on campus.

At this time, Soons said, Rave will be used only for emergency communications to advise the community of situations requiring immediate action or evacuation. Examples might include an active shooter or hostile intruder incident, bomb threat, hazardous material incident or weather emergency that might interrupt normal campus activities or operations. The system would be tested periodically so occasional “test” messages will appear. Students who are no longer enrolled will be removed from the alert list.

The college Web site has a dedicated emergency information page that could be widely accessed, Samara said. And when possible, dissemination of information door to door through staff might be part of the plan. “Finally, while some of our facilities are equipped with public address systems, we are currently exploring ways to expand this medium,” Samara said. Beginning next fall, each classroom in St. Edmund’s will have a public address feature. Another possibility under study for fast and efficient emergency communication is using the chapel carillon as a broadcaster through campus.

While all those measures address reaction to an incident, Samara also wants everyone to consider his or her personal role in the prevention of incidents. He said it might be as simple as raising concern over others who have been experiencing unusual stress, stopped taking needed medications, been caught in a difficult pattern of drug or alcohol abuse, experienced severe isolation, been consistently quick to anger, recently experienced significant loss, or recently acquired weapons or expressed new interest in weapons.

Anybody with concerns should seek out help and confide to student services staff, which could include the student life, counseling, health services, campus ministry or residence hall staff. Samara also urged students to be more alert to disruptions with non-student guests on campus, particularly on weekends. He said students are responsible for guest and must register them when they are on campus either for planned or spontaneous visits. They can do that through residence hall staff.

A faculty member recently told Samara that that ever since the Virginia Tech incident he talks with students on the first day of class “about how will we barricade the door, assign somebody to move the big desk, who will pull the shades, get away from windows, someone always brings a cell phone to class.”

“The Thursday night before students went on Spring Break, Peter and I spoke to the whole RA staff and student government general assembly, about 130 students, and we had Lt. Doug Allen with Colchester Police to talk about prevention and take questions.”

“Basically I say to students, ‘Please don’t ever be afraid to raise the red flag,” he said, noting that residence life staffers already regularly check on students’ well-being. “If a faculty person hasn’t seen somebody in class for several days, or a parent has tried to reach a child and not gotten a return call for several days, or maybe someone says ‘my best friend is really depressed,’ then we generally send a member of resident life staff to have a visit to say ‘somebody expressed worry about you, are you OK?’”

“We’d like parents to know that we do that, and it’s important to us,” Samara said. “Since we’re such a close-knit community, we feel we have a natural leg up on prevention since we tend to be a very caring community.”

Saint Michael's College - One Winooski Park, Colchester, VT 05439 - 800.SMC.8000