Chicago colleges ramp up security systems but plenty of challenges lie ahead

By Siddharth Vaidyanathan, Medill Reports

Before April 2006, Omnilert LLC., a Leesburg, Va.-based mass communications company, struggled to convince colleges and universities to buy their safety alert systems.

But following the Virginia Tech shootings in 2006 and those at Northern Illinois a year later, Congress passed a modification to the Jeanne Cleary Act requiring campus security to disclose crime statistics. Another amendment in 2008 took it a step further, mandating “emergency response and evacuation procedures.”

The past two years have seen a dramatic upgrade in college safety systems, and the company’s revenue has seen “quadruple-digit growth,” said Ara Bagdasarian, CEO of e2Campus, Omnilert’s Washington, D.C.-based text messae notification company and one of the leaders in campus safety systems.

Omnilert currently counts more than 600 colleges and universities as clients. A majority of those, around 570, signed on in the last two years, according to a company spokesman.

In Illinois, campus safety assumed even more importance when Gov. Rod Blogojevich signed the Campus Security Enhancement Act in August last year, making Illinois the first state to require all colleges and universities to plan for and practice responses to emergencies of all kinds.

Earlier this month, Chicago State University launched a new GPS-based technology to enhance campus safety. The mobile phone-activated personal safety tool that allows students to connect with and be monitored by the campus police was developed by Rave Wireless Inc., a Framingham, Mass.-based company.

With three robberies in the first two weeks of April, the administrators are hoping 70 percent of the student body to sign up. “Our earlier mobile system had around a 22 percent enrollment rate,” said Curticine Doyle, the director of telecommunications at CSU. “But we’re hoping for the new system to be more popular.”

Other universities aren’t far behind. Two months ago, Loyola University launched a mass notification system that will allow authorities to instantly contact the campus community during an emergency. DePaul University uses a notification system that allows the university to send emergency messages via phone, text and e-mail and 91 percent of currently enrolled students have provided contact information for the system, a spokeswoman said.

The University of Chicago has upgraded its safety alert system to handle a broader range of crime and Northern Illinois University has, predictably, more students clamoring to sign up for text alerts, according to a college spokesman.

But according to Steve Healy, a Princeton-based expert in campus law enforcement, a lot hinges on the marketing efforts of universities.

“The ones that really market these systems – through heavily-driven publicity and plenty of incentives – are the ones that have high sign-on rates,” said Healy, currently the director of public safety at Princeton University.

“Either you make it mandatory for all students to sign on or you make it optional and market it. Many universities do neither and then struggle to get students to sign on,” Healy said.

“Colleges realize they can use it to pass on information on things other than crime like weather alerts,” he added. And these devices would no doubt assume more importance in the wake of the swine flu outbreak, with colleges doing their best to inform students of the dangers.

The costs incurred, according to colleges, aren’t too alarming either. “It depends on the number of students and size of the campus but I would generally estimate the cost to work out to a dollar per student per semester,” said Bryan Crum, a spokesman for Omnilert.

Raju Rishi, the chief strategy officer and co-founder of Rave, didn’t want to estimate costs but said it was “extremely” affordable for the kind of services it offered. “In case you feel unsafe, all we ask you to do is press a few buttons and the police have your details, including your location.”

Most college administrators are ready to embrace new technology but instructors are conflicted, experts say.

As competition increases among technology firms to get into the educational space, more and more schools and colleges are interested in acquiring instruments that prevent cell phones from receiving signals from or transmitting signals to base stations, according to Howard Melamed, CEO of Florida-based CellAntenna Corporation.

“The use of mobile technology is creating havoc in educational systems because [students] are using it to cheat,” said Melamed. “And more and more places are looking out for mobile jamming equipment, those that effectively block signals.”

But there’s a big catch. According to the Communications Act of 1934 it is illegal to operate, manufacture, import, or offer for sale, jamming equipment. “It’s difficult to understand why we’re still hanging on to that law,” said Melamed.

Irrespective of the acceptance rates, the era of fixed blue-light phones and calling 911 on campus might be coming to an end, with more sophisticated wireless technology gaining ground.