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• Excerpts of Steger's speech
• A student's right to ask a question at the town hall meeting

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Virginia Tech is processing more than 400 recommendations on ways to improve campus safety after the April 16 shootings. Here are some examples of the recommendations and where they are in the process.

Implemented

• VT Alerts notification system alerts people of emergencies through various media, including text messaging.
• New counselor and case manager positions to deal with troubled students.

Being considered

• Electronic message boards in classrooms to notify students and faculty of emergencies.
• Interim suspension system to remove people from campus through a “leave of absence” option.

Rejected

• Micro Web site specifically for emergency information.

BLACKSBURG -- Virginia Tech officials gave some details Wednesday about their progress in dealing with recommendations resulting from the April 16 shootings on campus and promised more in the near future.

At a town hall-style meeting on campus Wednesday night, Tech President Charles Steger said the university so far has spent about $10.4 million in response to the shootings, which resulted in 33 deaths. And he reiterated comments that he made last fall about the importance of community feedback as the administration decides how to spend money to improve campus safety.

"If people do not support what we're trying to do, we will not be successful," he said.

About 50 people attended the meeting, which was competing with a postseason basketball game on campus. Questions from the audience ranged from why Tech doesn't allow students and faculty to carry guns in university buildings to how specific doors on campus buildings were not secure.

The university is processing more than 400 suggestions from internal reviews it conducted over the summer as well as from a state panel formed by Gov. Tim Kaine last spring. Some already have been enacted, some have been ruled out and others are at various points in the implementation process. The recommendations have been broken into 33 broad groups to make them easier to manage. The university has designated 17 of those for immediate action.

Many of them, such as changing hardware on exterior doors so they cannot be chained shut from the inside -- like entrances to Norris Hall were on April 16 -- and creating a university "threat assessment team" to deal with students who could pose a risk to themselves or others, have already been implemented.

In September, the university formed a plan to handle the recommendations through the work of a policy group of administrators and two special committees of faculty, staff and students. The policy group is using feedback from the committees to write reports to the president.

Steger is presenting reports to the board of visitors at their quarterly meetings.

Tech did not give a thorough breakdown Wednesday of where the recommendations stand, but will release details of all 33 recommendation groups on its Web site in the next week or two, Steger said.

University spokesman Larry Hincker said no decision has been made about whether there would be future meetings similar to Wednesday's to gauge community opinion.

English professor Bernice Hausman said there is some concern among students and faculty of "copycat" attempts of violence on campus around the April 16 anniversary and asked if additional measures are being taken to prevent that. Steger said there are but would not provide details.

Many recommendations are still up in the air and there is no concrete timeline for deciding on all of them. Steger talked about trying to balance privacy concerns with safety and weighing the cost of projects against estimates of how effective they would be. He mentioned one recommendation for installing an extensive closed-circuit surveillance system on campus.

"There are many people who do not think that is a good idea," he said.

Another recommendation that drew a question from the audience had to do with a "personal identification" system.

Erv Blythe, vice president for information technology, said it was difficult to quickly determine where people were during the April 16 shootings. Tech already has ways of calling up class schedule information and using wireless network logins to determine the location of students and faculty, but the university is looking for a way to pull the information together to be able to determine how to find people quickly in an emergency.

Hincker said that initiative would not amount to attaching tracking devices to students' hips as some people feared when it was first discussed.

"It's just a way to let us know you're OK," he said.