Easing campus insecurity

New safety precautions will greet college students returning to some campuses this fall — part of the legacy of the Virginia Tech massacre in April.

Sirens to warn of emergencies, text-message alert systems, committees to monitor questionable student behavior and anonymous-tip lines are all tools some schools are implementing to better protect students.

Today, Virginia Tech will dedicate a memorial to the 32 victims fatally shot by a fellow student who then killed himself during a campus rampage. In the immediate aftermath of the killings, many college officials and state leaders raced to review policies and procedures to look for any safety gaps or shortcomings.

They’ve found as many questions as answers.

“Virginia Tech caused everybody to really take a step back and evaluate strategically,” said Stephen G. Shelow, director of the Penn State University police.

Anecdotal stories show some behavioral changes — attendance at national campus-safety conferences increased, and parents have become more focused on student safety during school orientations.

Federally, a Senate-passed bill to renew the Higher Education Act includes a new grant program to help campuses develop and improve safety and emergency-response plans. The House in June passed a gun law designed to keep mentally ill persons from illegally purchasing firearms. And a panel of federal agencies in June completed a report that examined several topics related to the tragedy, including communication and mental health services.

Several broad state and school reviews — of safety programs, mental health policies and other pieces of the puzzle — are ongoing.

One of those is a task force created by Virginia Gov. Timothy M. Kaine to review the Virginia Tech incident in detail and issue specific recommendations. A report is forthcoming. In the meantime, the governor held a campus-safety summit last week for Virginia’s public and private colleges.

Paul Dillon, spokesman for the University of Maryland Department of Public Safety, said the school has a good safety program but, like other schools, is constantly trying to improve it.

Its Department of Public Safety includes about 80 to 100 trained police officers along with several key safety tools, including a threat-assessment system and campus cameras monitored around the clock.

“We’re never set,” Mr. Dillon said.

Spreading the word

Regardless of campus size or location, getting in touch with students, parents and faculty during a crisis is crucial to any alert system.

“Any time a tragedy occurs, you learn things. We learned a lot of kids aren’t using the phones in their [dorm] rooms anymore; they’re a cell [phone] community,” said Ray Thrower, director of safety at Gustavus Adolphus College and president of the International Association of Campus Law Enforcement Administrators (IACLEA).

One popular move for school leaders has been to purchase alert systems that enable them to send text messages and/or voicemail messages to cell phones.

Since Penn State already had such a text-alert system, Mr. Shelow said he fielded many calls in the days after the Virginia Tech tragedy from schools across the country seeking information.

Penn State’s voluntary subscribers to its own text-alert system grew from 2,000 before the tragedy to 20,000 in the weeks and months afterwards.

“I think that’s probably the biggest change we’ll see is the higher-ed organizations adopting mass-notification systems,” said Steven J. Healy, director of public safety at Princeton University, which purchased a similar system three weeks before the Virginia shootings.

Virginia Tech has since implemented a text-alert system, as did the University of Wyoming, Rutgers University and University of Maryland. Some already were looking into such systems, and the Virginia shootings pushed them to get it into place. Other schools, such as the University of Maine, are exploring the possibility.

The challenge is getting students to sign up for these text-alert networks. Rutgers and the University of Maryland are sending out mass e-mails, urging students to do so.

Meanwhile, some campuses quickly installed more “lower-tech” communication tools if they didn’t already have them. A new alert siren at the University of Maine will be in place when students return this fall and administrators also are exploring a campuswide loudspeaker system.

Coordination among school officers and local and state police also has become a major focus to ensure everyone is on the same page in case of an emergency.

The Illinois governor’s office arranged for radios to be given to its public colleges and some of its private colleges.

About 4,000 degree-granting colleges and universities are located throughout the country with a range of campus-safety setups. Safety officials say that because of this reality, needs vary and each school has a unique relationship with its local and state police.

Many schools routinely test their response plans with drills, many of which have recently been centered on an active-shooter scenario.

A July 25 drill at Rutgers University involved 150 volunteers and a scenario of three armed suspects with hostages. The University of Maryland’s campus security is planning a similar drill in January. And the University of Maine’s campus police will be responding next month, along with local, county and state police and rescue, to a daytime and nighttime drill involving a gunman.

“We think this is the responsible thing to do,” said Noel March, director of campus safety at the University of Maine campus in Orono.

Meanwhile, a few other moves are being made: Some schools are installing more call boxes around campus, directing campus police to talk to incoming freshman about how to respond to a shooting, or locking buildings more often — like Virginia Tech and George Mason University, which now lock main entrances to dormitories around the clock.

Last week, officials at George Mason also approved a regulation prohibiting everyone except law enforcement personnel from bringing a gun or other weapon onto campus. Students and employees already were banned from doing so, but now visitors also are barred from bringing weapons into any campus building or event.

Schools continuously looked for ways to improve their safety and communications long before the Tech killings happened, safety officials stress. Mr. Thrower and Mr. Healy said the greatest needs are more resources for campus to do emergency training and a national center for campus law enforcement, so officials can access information and guidance quickly and easily.

Owing to both the Virginia Tech shootings and a membership drive, IACLEA’s membership climbed to more than 2,000 members for the first time in its history. And the College and University Police and Investigators Conference, held at George Mason earlier this month, had 100 more participants this year than last.

Overall, changes have not been huge. A tweak here; a new precaution there. Rhonda Harris, Chief of Rutgers University Police Department, said a campus must continuously update its programs.

“I don’t know that you ever reach the point that you have done everything that you can do,” she said.

Matters of the mind

Preparedness is one way to limit such tragedies, but prevention remains the trickier component of the issue of school violence.

“What’s dominating the conversations right now is the mental health component,” Mr. Shelow said. “It’s enormously tricky.”

Cho Seung-hui, the 23-year-old gunman at Virginia Tech, had noticeable signs of mental problems and, it was widely reported, was found by a Virginia court in 2005 to be mentally ill. But when, how and by whom should such information be reported and analyzed? Furthermore, what can schools legally do?

Brett Sokolow is founder and president of the National Center for Higher Education Risk Management, a risk-management consulting firm that counsels many colleges and universities.

He said many of his clients seek guidance on confusing and often misunderstood federal privacy laws governing how much they can communicate with each other and with parents about a student’s mental health problems.

“Certain federal privacy laws that have scared the heck out of college administrators” and are “seen as being far more comprehensive than they are,” he said.

In reality, the Health Information Privacy Protection Act and Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act “don’t create an absolute wall of silence,” he explained.

For instance, he said, if one or more of the parents claim their college-aged child as a dependent, school officials can call the parents about any issue or problem that arises with the student. They also need assurance that a counselor can alert school officials if a student doesn’t show up for a mandatory appointment, he said.

Mr. Sokolow said there’s also “greater interest” post-Virginia Tech for developing involuntary medical withdrawal procedures on campuses opting for mandated psychological evaluations for troubled students.

University of Wisconsin-Madison Police Chief Sue Riseling encourages the school’s campuses to revamp their student-conduct codes, which is among 17 recommendations made by a school commission she chaired post-Virginia Tech. Campuses are to report back about the changes and adjustments they will make.

She explained there’s usually a continuum of symptoms displayed by a student leading to a violent outburst. If a student is purposely cutting or hurting himself or herself, for example, that is “a huge warning sign” of possible eventual violence against others, she said. Yet current school code doesn’t outlaw this behavior.

“We need to revamp that,” she said.

If a student exacts self-inflicted injury or attempts suicide, she said, the school should be able to give that student “a mental health timeout” — move him or her out of school, return that semester’s tuition money, make sure necessary help is provided and create a smooth, hassle-free path for the student to return to school once problems are resolved.

She said this “soft-landing” approach is much better than the current “adversarial” setup, which often involves lawyers.

Another tool schools are using is multidiscipliniary teams that track troubling behavior of students, faculty and staff. The University of Wisconsin panel suggested that each campus implement one, and the University of Maine already has a similar team that meets on an as-needed basis, but that panel will become permanent this fall, holding weekly meetings.

Schools are also trying to harness those on the front lines — students themselves — to report peers who are deeply depressed or suicidal.

One noticeable shift after the Virginia Tech incident, Maryland’s Mr. Dillon said, is that his department fielded more calls from people concerned about others’ suspicious behavior.

“I suspect that will continue into the fall,” he said.

University of Maine officials urge students to use the already existing anonymous-tip line — normally used to report cheating, drug use and the like — to report emotional or behavioral problems. The University of Wyoming is installing a similar anonymous-tip line that will be in place by fall as well.

Even with these efforts however, the University of Maine-Orono’s Mr. March asked, “How do you predict the unpredictable?”