EDWARDSVILLE Ill.
In line on her college campus to donate blood, Angela Negron
was unsure which was more surprising: That the school's police happened upon a
fellow student's cryptic note allegedly threatening mayhem rivaling April's
massacre at Virginia Tech, or that she had to learn of the threat from a
reporter not the school five days after it surfaced.
Either way, the 18-year-old nursing student at Southern Illinois University in this St. Louis suburb wasn't overly put off by either.
"I feel safe here," she said this week, a day after 22-year-old student Olutosin Oduwole was charged with attempting to make a terrorist threat in the note police say was found in his disabled car on campus July 20.
Police say that note crawled on a sheet of paper that included rap lyrics made no direct reference to targeting SIU's campus, and that they believed no attack was imminent. But Negron said a campus-wide notification about the threat would have been appreciated.
Southern Illinois, however, has no immediate, universal way of warning the campus when such danger is near or possible.
The current notification system deals with getting the word out by radio, television and the university's automated telephone system and staff voicemail when wintry weather forces classes there to be canceled, spokesman Greg Conroy said. When severe storms are closing in, a campus loudspeaker also tells folks through a recorded message to take cover.
Still, the Virginia Tech shootings that left 32 people and the gunman dead were an awakening, Conroy said. Virginia Tech was criticized for what many called its slow response in getting the word out about the gunfire. The case prodded universities across the country to revisit how they warn students and staff when trouble is near; at SIU, it was "motivation to get our system beefed up," Conroy said.
Within weeks, he said, the Edwardsville school empaneled a committee to assess the issue. The answer: A system by which warnings by text messages or voice mails will be hustled to cell phones of students and staff who subscribe, all at university expense.
