Vanderbilt reviews safety measures taken in the wake of last year’s school shootings.
Wednesday marks the one-year anniversary of the Virginia Tech shootings, in which a student killed 32 people in an on-campus shooting spree.
In its aftermath, schools nationwide revisited their safety procedures, and Vanderbilt was no exception.
“We have a number of emergency plans that we constantly refine and practice,” said Vice Chancellor for Public Affairs Mike Schoenfeld. “What occurred at Virginia Tech can happen anywhere, though, and even college campuses, which are among the safest places around, can become victims of horrible tragedies.”
As Marlon Lynch, chief of Vanderbilt Police Department, pointed out, the university took steps as soon as reports of the shooting were made available.
“As the situation developed, we took that time to review our own procedures for similar incidents,” Lynch said. “We took the opportunity to access our existing plans and make upgrades where they were needed.”
According to Lynch, three federal agencies, the departments of Education, Justice, and Health and Human Services, came up with five key steps for VUPD to better their protocol: eliminating obstacles to sharing critical information, documenting accurate and complete information on individuals prohibited from possesing bombs or guns, improving awareness, providing people with mental illness the care they need, and improving existing protocol.
Last Friday, Vanderbilt’s new alert system, AlertVU, was utilized for the first time, providing a live test of the program for VUPD that used not only sirens, phone calls and text messages, but also mobilization of the police force to warn and protect students.
“Our mass notification system now relies upon redundancy of warnings, rather than just text messages,” Lynch said. “We have a few things we need to work out with the system, such as making sure everyone receives their warning in a timely fashion, but for the most part everyone was close enough to someone who did receive a warning.”
Students’ reactions to the new system were generally positive.
“It worked fine for me,” said freshman Daniel Ohngemach. “There were some people in my lecture hall class who didn’t get the message immediately, but since we were all in one place, it turned out OK.”
How safe students perceive their campus to be is, no doubt, of utmost concern to the Vanderbilt administration, especially at a time when the community will stop to remember Virginia Tech.
“I feel like I know where to go and what to do to keep myself out of danger here, but Vanderbilt hasn’t really helped me with that directly,” said freshman Brian Linhares. “The real stuff that keeps you safe gets to you by word of mouth.”
—Adam Weinstein can be reached at adam.w.weinstein@vanderbilt.edu
