Tarleton to implement emergency alerts

The tragic shooting that took place at Virginia Tech University last year has forced university administrators to assess their institutions' weaknesses and search for ways to make campuses safer for students, faculty and staff.

After assessing various methods available in which to achieve additional safety, Tarleton State University established Code Purple.

The state-of-the-art system is designed to notify individuals of emergencies such as closings or delays due to weather, crime alerts or other events that pose a threat to those on or coming to the campus.

"Safety and security is paramount for our students, and we fully support efforts to keep all of our locations as safe and secure as possible," said Tarleton President Dennis P. McCabe.

Code Purple is a mass-notification system that can alert students via text messages on their cell phones. This may be the most effective method as approximately 90 percent of college students own cell phones.

Tarleton officials, however, wanted to select an emergency notification company that would use more than one method in which to notify individuals of an emergency. For that reason, e2Campus was chosen to administer the system.

Through e2Campus, Code Purple is able to send time-sensitive messages to its subscribers via text messages, Blackberry phones, wireless PDAs, text pagers, e-mail or Internet home pages. Subscribers can include students, faculty, staff, radio stations, media outlets and others.

All subscriber information will remain private and won't be sold or shred with third parties.

The system is voluntary, and subscribers may opt-in or opt-out at any time. There is no charge from the university to a subscriber, but there may be an additional charge for the text message, depending on the individual wireless carrier plan.