BELTON, Texas (ABP) — Police cars and fire engines lined the streets on the north side of the University of Mary-Hardin Baylor campus April 18. Paramedics carried students on stretchers and loaded them into ambulances.
This time, it was just a drill — an emergency response exercise planned long before the armed rampage two days earlier at Virginia Tech. And while few — if any — other Baptist schools held emergency response drills in the days following the Virginia massacre, most reported they had in place plans for dealing with a variety of emergency situations.
At Mary-Hardin Baylor, a Texas Baptist school, an emergency planning committee had scheduled the drill — a simulated hazardous-materials spill on the railroad tracks adjacent to the UMHB campus — months earlier, university spokesperson Carol Woodward said.
The exercise was part of an ongoing program of training and preparation designed to test the response capabilities of first responders, she said. Last summer, for instance, the university provided a training site for about 70 law-enforcement officers as they dealt with a simulated hostage situation in a women's dormitory.
University officials considered canceling the latest drill in light of the Virginia Tech tragedy, but they decided to proceed and concentrate on letting students, parents and people in the surrounding community know it was not a real emergency.
Other schools have taken similar precautions. President Bill Underwood of Georgia's Mercer University said that immediately after the Virginia Tech shooting he initiated a complete review of his school's emergency response plan.
“I have asked that we validate and improve the plan in order to ensure that we are doing everything possible to prevent, and if necessary, effectively respond to campus emergencies,” he said.
Mercer is implementing a mobile-phone-based system to provide instant emergency information to students, augmenting the school's existing Internet, e-mail and call-in communications systems, he added.
At Baylor University in Texas, officials sent a message to the school's varied constituencies. It asked, “How prepared are we for such an occurrence?”
“While preventing an attack with 100 percent certainty is impossible, I want to reassure you that we do have systems in place to respond to emergencies on campus and to minimize harm to our students, staff and faculty,” Baylor President John Lilley said. “It is impossible to predict when such tragedies will happen, but we are making our best effort to be prepared in case the unthinkable occurs.”
Baylor employs 24 trained and commissioned police officers who conduct crisis simulation training exercises. The school operates under general rules about closing the campus and has established protocols for handling specific kinds of emergencies, he noted.
The university's crisis-management team, composed of staff and administrators, also conducts crisis simulation drills. The group was slated, Lilley said, to meet to review the Virginia Tech situation and to “review our plans for handling such a situation in light of this recent experience.”
“We have an emergency public-address system in all residence halls and some academic buildings to communicate public-safety information as necessary,” Lilley added. Baylor also recently installed a dual e-mail and voicemail emergency notification system.
Even smaller schools, such as East Texas Baptist University in Marshall, Texas, can send emergency e-mail messages to students, faculty and staff in the event of emergencies, President Bob Riley said.
“If a crisis occurs, you will receive information with directions and actions to take,” he wrote in an e-mail to students soon after the Virginia Tech shooting. “Although unofficial, we know that individual cell phones and text messaging will alert many who have not read an e-mail message.”
Samford University in Birmingham, Ala., had just announced plans for campus-safety restructuring, already in process for several weeks, just as news from Virginia Tech began to unfold.
“The plan is to focus on service and security,” said Richard Franklin, Samford's dean of students. “The new structure and function enhances communications with students, faculty and staff.”
Samford President Andrew Westmoreland said his school has taken every reasonable step to provide for the safety of students and others on campus.
“I acknowledge that, within a free society, there are limits to our ability to control for every circumstance,” Westmoreland said. “However, we will seek to learn from this horrible tragedy and to enhance the security of the campus.”
Underwood at Mercer struck a similar chord. “In the free and open society that we enjoy, there are clearly some risks associated with those freedoms,” he said. “Our challenge is to reduce that risk as much as possible. Our highest priority is, and always will be, the safety of our students, faculty and staff.”
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