Emergency alerts good idea if they are timely and accurate
Text messaging to alert students about emergency events are great, provided they are delivered in a timely manner and aren’t truncated so much as to render the original message worthless. Or, as in the case recently at Florida State University, encompasses more than was originally intended.
Recently, a text message sent out about a suspicious package in a particular parking garage on campus ended up listing just a parking garage, not a specific garage. This could have covered any of the school’s parking facilities. The other problem was that the messages weren’t received by many students until a couple hours after the incident was first reported.
Read more here from the school’s student newspaper.
