ALL COUNTIES: A task force says University of North Carolina campuses should develop plans for responding to any emergency, conduct regular disaster drills and develop ways to notify students and school employees of problems.
The UNC system's Campus Safety Task Force, formed after a fatal shooting spree at Virginia Tech last spring, on Wednesday discussed 23 ideas for possible responses to campus emergencies. Those could include floods, a flu epidemic and fires as well as an active gunman.
The group agreed that all of the system's 16 university campuses should come up with better contingency plans, and hold frequent, complex disaster drills.
"If you don't do that, you're destined to fail in an emergency," said David Rainer, associate vice chancellor of environmental health and public safety at North Carolina State. "It shows you where your weak links are. It shows you where things can go wrong."
The officials also discussed ways to alert students, staff and faculty of dangerous situations. NCSU and UNC-Chapel Hill plan to install siren systems, while the Chapel Hill campus has set up a text message notification service for cell phones. The concern is whether cell phone towers can handle the volume of data that would move in such circumstances.
Another problem is building security. Task force members noted that, while dorms have key card readers meant to control access, residents often prop open the doors or let strangers inside.
"I can be at any residence hall on my campus and be in that residence hall within 30 seconds," Rainer said.
The group is still working on ways to prevent violent acts altogether, such as forming threat assessment teams, including psychologists, police, faculty and administrators, who would keep an eye on troubled students.
The idea of a campus hot line or Web-based tip sheet to report suspicious behavior sounded unwieldy, with the potential of overwhelming the teams with vague complaints.
The group will discuss other issues in the coming weeks such as how to deal with threatening behavior, privacy laws, student conduct codes and weapons. It is due to make a final report in the fall.
Another statewide panel was created by Attorney General Roy Cooper after 32 Virginia Tech students and faculty were killed in April by a student gunman, who also killed himself.
That group also is discussing ways to address safety at the state's 36 private colleges and universities, and its 58 community colleges as well as the UNC system.
