CSU gets alert system running

Students, staff receive messages in minutes

From his office computer, Rusty Bruns demonstrated Charleston Southern University's new rapid emergency notification system by typing a test message and sending it to himself.

About 45 seconds later, his office phone and cell phone rang. The typed message had been converted to a voice message which Bruns, the school's chief information officer, could listen to on either phone.

If a true emergency befalls the campus, he said, Burns now can send a message within minutes to the school's 3,500 students, faculty and staff members. Each person in the system can have emergency notices sent to up to three phone numbers, a pager number and an e-mail address and also can be notified by text message.

Bruns said university officials decided that the school needed a more comprehensive notification system to reach students in an emergency after the shootings in April at Virginia Tech. And they found one in TechRadium's Immediate Response Information System, he said.

"The goal is for us to reach kids anytime we want, anywhere," Bruns said Tuesday.

They had previously relied primarily on posting updates on the university's Web site, Bruns said.

TechRadium's system will cost the university about $10,000 each year, he said. He chose that particular system because in addition to sending emergency notifications, it also prints out a report that verifies that the message got to the intended recipient, he said. That's important, he said, not only for safety reasons but because it will protect the university from lawsuits from people who claim they weren't notified.

In the future, the system also will be used for more routine communication, he said.

In the wake of the tragedy at Virginia Tech, other local and state colleges, universities and school systems are considering putting in place similar notification systems. At the University of South Carolina, an expanded notification system will be in place later this month, spokesman Russ McKinney said.

Rachel Smalley, a senior and a resident assistant in one of Charleston Southern's residence halls, said the new system "takes the pressure off administrators and R.A.s."

In the past, Smalley said, she had to make about 40 phone calls to notify those who lived on her floor about emergency situations.

Julia Grinn, a senior from Rochester, Ind., said she will include her cell phone number as well as her husband's and mother's cell phone numbers in the system.

If something dangerous is happening on campus, "our families will know immediately, and that brings a lot of comfort to students," she said.

And she'll request that the system also send her a text message.

Smalley and Grinn both said the best way to reach most students is by text message.

Grinn said it's difficult to imagine a violent incident like the shootings at Virginia Tech happening at Charleston Southern, but it's good to have an effective emergency notification system in place just in case.

She expects it will mostly be used to notify students about hurricanes.

Smalley said she thinks parents will appreciate the new system even more than students. She said her parents complained that the school didn't communicate with them enough when she was sent home during a hurricane threat in the early days of her freshman year.

Bruns said he thinks such notification systems are becoming increasingly important to campus communities.

"In the future, parents and students will demand it," he said.

Reach Diane Knich at 937-5491 or dknich@postandcourier.com.