Serving Boone, Blowing Rock, Banner Elk, and other towns of the North Carolina High Country
Founded 05-05-05
March 20, 2008 issue
Police Chief Says University Needs To Test Alert Systems Soon
Story by David Brewer
Weeks after ASU senior English major Matthew Haney fabricated a story about a pistol-wielding burglar walking in the direction of campus, students, faculty and school officials are still pondering the events of Monday, March 3, and the effects of the first ever campus-wide lockdown.
In an recent interview, ASU Police Chief Gunther Doerr said campus police and university employees “handled the [gun scare] as we had planned and discussed.”
Doerr was in Asheville on business when he was first notified of the situation and immediately returned to campus. Although he was not present, the chief was kept abreast of the situation by phone. By the time Doerr reached ASU, the situation, determined to be a hoax, was virtually over.
Although official security bulletins were delivered via ASU’s website, beginning with an initial announcement at 4:11 p.m. followed by announcement of the campus lockdown at 5:10 p.m., many students, including a tennis class playing just across Rivers Street from the Convocation Center, could be seen in the area of the supposed sighting, seemingly unaware of the emergency announcements.
According to ASU Child Development Center director Peggy Eller, she and her staff were notified by a call from a concerned parent, and were unaware of the emergency bulletins. Eller and her staff moved the children from the playground inside the daycare facility. Eller said she and her staff have received intruder training and followed the guidelines until the situation was resolved.
English teaching assistant and graduate student Erin Zimmerman and fellow faculty members were located in the teacher assistant office in Sanford Hall when campus police entered the building. According to Zimmerman, she and the others were advised to stay in the room. However, Zimmerman added that some teachers in Sanford Hall excused their students from class and told them to return to their dorms, while other teachers told their students to stay put in the classroom, not knowing quite what to do in regard to their safety.
English graduate students and teaching assistants Jonathan Bradshaw and Travis Rountree were in Crossroads coffee shop in Plemmons Student Union when all the doors were closed and the facility was locked down. An student union employee made an announcement about the situation, advising those present to move to the restrooms if the shooter entered the premises.
Rountree and Bradshaw were also asked to sign a “safe list” in case their parents tried to contact the university to determine their whereabouts.
With high-profile campus shootings dominating headlines around the nation over the last year, Doerr and university officials have not been sitting idly by.
“We started reviewing our plans right after the Virginia Tech incident,” said Doerr, admitting however, that ASU doesn’t have the means to lock down the entire campus. “We probably don’t have the resources to do that. It would be like locking down a small town. We’re probably going to look at focusing on a particular target area. That’s an area that we’re looking at to be more definitive to groups on campus.”
With new faculty members coming and going from ASU each semester, questions remain unanswered about how the school can best educate incoming professors, making them aware of proper classroom or campus building protocol in case of a lockdown situation.
Professor James Barnes was attending a reception at Chancellor Ken Peacock’s house when news of the supposed gunman was released. While he praised the university for its quick dissemination of information, he admitted that effectively alerting hundreds of professors and thousands of students is a daunting proposition.
“The university is such a decentralized organization; you just can’t call 500 or 600 faculty and tell them what to do,” said Barnes. “It’s inherently a virtually impossible situation. I thought they did a good job letting people know, considering the situation.”
Mere hours before the first bulletin was posted to the university’s homepage regarding the gunman, criminal justice professor Matthew Robinson lectured to his students about how such a scenario was unlikely to ever occur at ASU. Robinson was shocked to find out that a breaking news story on the Watauga Democrat website contained more factual information than the announcements being released by ASU. The Democrat story detailed the developing situation’s connection to an alleged break-in—a detail that Robinson felt changed the entire context of the situation.
“People that shoot up schools don’t start out stealing televisions,” said Robinson.
Robinson suggested that by not posting the break-in related part of the story, university officials inadvertently created a media feeding frenzy resulting in multiple news helicopters circling overhead and cable news provider CNN breaking the story nationally.
“By not providing enough info, they created fear,” said Robinson, adding that Peacock agreed with his assessment after reading a letter he submitted to the chancellor, Doerr and The Appalachian.
Another topic of conversation in post-lockdown discussions has been a line on ASU’s safety bulletins on March 3, stating that the campus was operating under “standby” conditions, later reverting to “normal” conditions. According to Doerr, the campus has no definitive guidelines for such conditions.
“That’s another piece that was not very clear and is still being sorted out,” said Doerr.
While Doerr’s staff acted accordingly, and many students, faculty, parents and local residents were alerted to the emergency via the website, frustration grew rapidly among those who tried in vain to communicate by cell phone. The sudden flood of calls overloaded area networks, forcing callers to dial numerous times before getting through.
In recent months, ASU has been encouraging students to sign up for APPSTATE-ALERT test and/or voice messaging. APPSTATE-ALERT is the ASU 24/7 emergency messaging system. Using a combination of text messaging, voice messaging, email and web technologies, APPSTATE-ALERT is designed to provide students, faculty and staff members with timely information in the event of a campus emergency. Although less than one-third of all students are currently signed up for the service, Doerr is concerned about the reliability of the system in an emergency situation and expressed his desire to run a live test before the end of the spring semester.
“We need to test that to see if it works; we need to test the infrastructure in Watauga County to see if it can handle a blast of several thousand calls,” said Doerr. “We need to get a feel for what will happen to our system once we blast those calls out. The system can push out a lot of calls in a minute. The question is, ‘can the infrastructure handle the calls?’”