There have been more than 125 mass shooting incidents in the US in just the first three months of 2023 alone. The IU Emergency Management team says that the school’s emergency alert system “IU Notify” may not reach students quickly enough to keep them safe.
The first thing that faculty, staff and students on campus could expect in the event of a “critical situation” would be an IU Notify alert via email and text.
However, the emergency alert system is an opt-in system. Students are instructed to sign up for the system as part of a safety module for New Student Orientation programs, but the numbers show that many are not.
IU Bloomington Director of Emergency Management John Summerlot says that fewer than 40% of all students are enrolled in the program, but even for students who are enrolled, Summerlot says the messages may not come quickly enough to be useful in an emergency.
IU Bloomington Director of Emergency Management John Summerlot outlines timeline for university response to critical situations.
Summerlot says that on average it takes between four and a half and five minutes for everyone to receive their message. The average active shooter incident lasts somewhere between four and six minutes. “You can’t necessarily rely on getting that IU notify message,” Summerlot said.
Instead, Summerlot says he urges students to sign up for the campus-wide Rave Guardian app. The app can deliver IU Notify alerts in real time, and it also has a number of other safety features like the Safe Walk Timer to notify family and friends if the user is not home when expected. It also has a chat feature to send anonymous tips to police.
IU Police Department Chief Jill Lees addresses low IU Notify student participation rates.
Following the Michigan State University shooting that killed three and injured five in March, many faculty members and departments reached out to the Emergency Management team to request refresher courses on emergency procedure.
The Friday after the shooting at the Big Ten school, Emergency Management conducted training at the IU Media School. However, this was an event that had been on the calendar for months.
The university had a small test of emergency preparedness last September when reports of an armed man in the sewer system forced IUPD to evacuate Franklin Hall.
Some IU staff members who were present for the evacuation say that the process went less than smoothly. Franklin Hall Assistant Building Manager Darla Crawford says that the scene was “chaos.”
“The students who were upstairs, were in a classroom. They still, you know, didn’t know what to do. They were crying. What do we do? Do we leave? Do we stay? No one knew,” she said.
IU NewsNet interviewed IUPD Chief Jill Lees about the Franklin Hall evacuation, and she has a very different account of how the evacuation went.
Lees said, “I think that that approach [the evacuation] worked really well. In that case, yes, the IU notify though came out first. And then obviously, our team was very heavily had heavy presence in the area. And we’re able to facilitate that very effectively.”
In response to the events at Franklin Hall, Crawford says she’s received a lot of feedback from faculty who work in the building who feel unsafe. “A lot of the staff members and faculty have come up, they’re really concerned that we do not know what to do. I do have a panic button now. I’ve had to use it one time,” Crawford said.
In the event of a more serious emergency moving forward, Summerlot says that the best thing students can do is “run, hide and fight” in that order. This command represents the approved method of the FBI, but the technique has come under fire recently due to recent events in which the deadly speed of some automatic weapons eliminated time for hiding. An example is the Club Q nightclub shooting in Colorado Springs.
“Run, hide, fight” means first get away from the danger; hide yourself if possible and fight only as a last resort. Summerlot also advises those in a critical situation to take instructions from first responders on the scene.
