PROVIDENCE, R.I.—After the tragedy of Virginia Tech in 2007, colleges and universities rushed to adopt mass notification technologies. Most of these systems required students to submit their cell phone numbers in order to receive emergency notifications. However, this reliance on third-party cellular carriers has caused concern for some educational security directors, including Koren Kanadanian, director of emergency management at Providence College.

“With cell phones, the problem is that once we hit the button to push out the message through the system we’re limited by the cellular carriers,” he said. “We have no control over how that message gets out, so it could take quite a while. We do a test each semester to 6,000 people and sometimes it takes 30 minutes or more for that message to go out.”

Kanadanian said it wasn’t the primary message that concerned him as much as the follow-up message. As soon as the initial warning is sent, students are likely to immediately use their cell phones to call friends and parents, further stressing the cellular network and likely hindering the ability for the school to issue updated information. “An active shooter is a very fluid incident and within a minute or two the threat could be in another building or area of campus,” he said. “I might give an initial message and need to follow it up in a short time frame.”

Next semester, the school will begin using a dedicated emergency alert system, the RavenAlert system from IntelliGuard Systems, which notifies students via a key fob rather than through their cell phones. “With the fob it’s nice knowing it’s specific to just emergency messages and if it goes off then something is happening,” he said. Whereas, other schools have had problems with students being confused or ignoring emergency messages from the school when it comes via their personal cell phone.

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