Recent cell phone registration numbers for the UPennAlert notification system show an approximately 10 percent increase from the beginning of October. Sixty-one percent of students and 31 percent of faculty and staff have registered their cell-phone numbers, compared to about 50 percent of students who had done so in the beginning of October, according to Vice President for Public Safety Maureen Rush.
Last Thursday's shooting at Northern Illinois University, however, has drawn attention to how colleges respond to emergencies. Though NIU followed a variety of protocols, there was no way of reaching students and staff on their cell phones when a former student opened fire in a lecture hall.
"We aren't all sitting around in our dorms and offices all day," so it is important to have various ways of notifying people in an emergency, "especially a situation like NIU," Rush said. "Cell phones are the easiest way to get a hold of people today."
Implemented last August, the UPennAlert system has seen no changes in light of the recent shootings.
"We have been working on an emergency plan for years and this just reinforces the need for us to be able to get a hold of people immediately," Rush said.
Rush, however, doesn't think that having such a system would have changed the outcome of the shooting in Illinois.
"NIU did a fabulous job with timeliness and used their mechanisms well," she said.
Jonathan Kassar, executive director of Security on Campus - a nonprofit organization that advocates for campus safety measure in Pennsylvania - agrees. Not being able to contact people on their cell phones at NIU "doesn't appear to have been a problem because they used other methods," he said.
After a gunman killed 33 people, including himself, last April at Virginia Tech, the school was criticized for not being able to immediately notify the campus of the situation.
"Even if 100 percent of a campus registers, that isn't a guarantee," Kassar said. "What matters is how staff is trained and how systems and staff are used."
It is "not just about electronics," Rush agreed and explained that Penn Police officers have been trained to deal with an active-shooter situation.
"If something is already happening, these systems don't prevent - they mitigate," Rush said, but she pointed out that UPennAlert can also be used proactively if officials receive warning of a threat.
The Division of Public Safety already has access to all University e-mail addresses and the office phone numbers of faculty and staff, but everyone must enter his or her own cell-phone numbers. Because students do not have office phones, it is even more important that they sign up, Rush said.
Executive Vice President Craig Carnaroli, Provost Ron Daniels and DPS will send out an e-mail announcing an upcoming test of the UPennAlert system within the next week.
*The following clarification for this article ran on Feb. 21, 2008:
The 10 percent increase in registration from early October referred only to students registration. Furthermore, due to an editing error, the name of Jonathan Kassa, the executive director of Security on Campus, was misspelled. It was incorrectly noted as Kassar.
