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Alert system put to use for real campus emergency By Kristie Vela |
 Rubi Reyes / The South Texan Students sit down for dinner at the cafeteria after a three hour lock-down |
The Texas A&M University- Kingsville alert system was put to use on Wednesday, April 16 for a real emergency taking place on campus that afternoon causing the campus to be put on lock-down for three hours.
During that time the alert system sent out e-mails and automated phone calls to faculty, staff, and student’s cell phones or home phone numbers. However the effectiveness of the system to notify everyone has not yet been perfected.
“Some people only received the e-mails and some people only received the phone calls. There were also some people who didn’t receive all three emails” said Jill Scoggins, Director of Public Relations.
Another glitch in the alert system is that it only contacts those who are in the human resource database leaving some people on campus out of the loop.
“Employees in the pharmacy building are part of the Texas A&M Health System Center so they are not in our human resource database. We are working on a way to figure out how to get them into ours” said Scoggins.
In general the system worked well at informing the campus community about the situation. ConnectEd, the company that runs the alert system is doing their own research and investigation on how the system works. The university is also conducting research.
“We don’t have the final percentages yet, but we did a study a month ago and found 10 to 12 percent of the phone numbers didn’t work, and we believe that is still the same amount” said Scoggins. “We have had good verbal feedback and we feel good about the campus response.”
A forum will be held on Tuesday, April 29 at noon in the Memorial Student Union Building ballroom to discuss the alert system.