Friday, June 22, 2007
Text-message alerts to be ready at Tech by 1st day of classes
School officials looked into the emergency system after the search for an escaped prisoner.
Virginia Tech will debut a text-message alert system July 2, the university announced Thursday.
The system will allow students, faculty and staff to be notified of emergencies by messages sent to their cellphones. The service will be provided by 3N National Notification Network, a California mass communications company.
The university signed a contract to pay the company $200,000 over four years for the service, Tech spokesman Mark Owczarski said. The first year will be free, however, and Tech will be allowed to opt out of the contract in years two, three and four, effectively protecting the university from paying anything if it's unsatisfied with the first year of service.
Tech began looking into text message alerts after the campus was shut down on the first day of classes in August in the midst of the search for escaped prisoner William Morva. The university was in the process of selecting a vendor when the April 16 campus shootings resulted in the deaths of 33 students and faculty.
Tech used e-mail alerts, its Web site, a campus hotline, voice mail "blasts" to campus phones and a siren and loudspeaker system to alert people of the shootings that day.
Employees and students at Tech can sign up for the new program starting July 2, and it will be fully operational by Aug. 20, the first day of classes. People can sign up through a university Web site that Tech will construct. There is no fee, other than charges from cellphone companies for receiving text messages.
In addition to cellphones, subscribers can also choose to be alerted via e-mail or online networks. Students, faculty and staff will be allowed to sign up friends and family for the service, so they can also be notified of emergencies on campus.
Exactly what constitutes an emergency is decided by university leadership and could include a variety of circumstances, from weather events to reports of violence on campus.
"But the intent of this system and us developing this system is for emergency notification, rather than to announce things like tickets are on sale," Owczarski said.
