In response to the Virginia Tech shootings that claimed the lives of 32 people, the Board of Regents is executing a contract with a company that will make a text messaging alert system available for all state colleges and universities. The University was contacted by the Board of Regents offering to purchase the system. The scheduled release date is Dec. 5, Eugene Dial, vice president of student affairs and enrollment services, said.

In order for the text alert to be effective, students who are willing to participate must be willing to “surrender their cellular phone number” to the University, Craig Jaccuzzo, university chief of police, said. The University would only use the phone number for emergency purposes and the text alert would only be effective for those with texting capabilities.

LSU and the University of Louisiana at Lafayette were the first two universities in the state to implement a text alert system, according to an article in The Advocate. LSU has signed up about 30 percent of the campus since the text alert was implemented five months ago. ULL has registered approximately 10 percent of students in about one month.

“Nationally everybody said, ‘Oh this is the greatest thing. We need to do this so everybody can be notified,'” Dial said. “What they’re finding across the country is that people aren’t participating. It’s not the catch-all thing.”

A problem with text alerts and voicemails is the amount of time they take to reach people. By the time a person receives the initial alert, the situation may have changed, and a new alert may have to be sent to give an update of what may be occurring and/or safe places to go, Dial said.

“Like this guy at Virginia Tech,” Dial said. “He moved around from building to building. We’d have to keep re-sending messages to update, because it may have been safe to go to Beauregard, for instance, but if the shooter moves to Beauregard, then another message would have to be sent.”

Currently, if there is an emergency on campus, the University will use a variety of communication methods to notify those on campus of a crisis situation.

Information will be immediately posted on the University’s website; an E-mail will be sent to all campus E-mail addresses; a voicemail will be broadcasted to all campus extensions and posted to the emergency alert hotline; a message will be broadcast on the University television and radio stations and media alert distributed to all area print and broadcast media representatives; the call boxes will be activated so that the blue lights flash; and an announcement will be made in the Bolinger Memorial Student Union and Galiano Cafeteria over the public address system.

“If text messaging will reach 20 percent of the population, well that’s great,” Dial said. “The computer may reach another 10 percent, the blue lights on the call boxes may reach 10 percent. We need to try to branch out in a bunch of different ways to communicate with everybody in an emergency.