College of Lake County steps up emergency plans

College of Lake County students and staff will soon be able to get cell phone alerts warning them of a shooting or some other emergency before arriving at the Grayslake campus.

A new mass notification system would use text messaging and voice mail to alert students of any crises. It's part of the college's recently updated emergency operations plan.

"We can do e-mail; we can do public address right now for people who are on campus," said Kevin Lowry, College of Lake County's director of campus safety. "We don't have anything in place to warn people before they get here. With all of the (campus shooting) incidents, it became imperative that we need to budget for this type of system."

Students and staff would have to sign up to receive alerts, which are expected to begin during fall semester. The college is still reviewing vendors for the system.

The college's new safety rules, which call for training and arming campus police by Oct. 1, are more comprehensive, said Lowry, the soon-to-be police chief.

The revised plan calls for establishing an incident command structure for dealing with emergencies similar to what fire departments and other law enforcement agencies use. The system was developed in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.

"What it tries to do is make it uniform so everybody is using the same language, everybody's got the same structure," Lowry said.

That structure would be put in place in a situation where multiple public safety agencies are responding to a major emergency such as a fire or shooting on campus.

The college also has developed a tool for staff to help identify behavioral problems with students or employees early on before it blows up into a Virginia Tech or Northern Illinois University type situation. The college has set up a new crisis intervention team to help in such situations.

"It addresses disruptive individuals, or individuals that might be in depression in class, and maybe even a staff member in an office," Lowry said. "It gives samples of what might be crisis behavior for an individual and then what would be the appropriate response."

Lowry said the goal of the crisis intervention team is to bridge the communication gap between departments that may independently come into contact with a problem individual.

College faculty and staff will be continuously trained on the new emergency operations plan throughout the year.

College of Lake County also will start conducting regular fire and tornado drills from now on, as well as mock campus shooting exercises to put the plan into practice.

"It's just to get that safety more forward in everybody's mind and kind of ingrain into them these are the actions that they should take," Lowry said. "The more frequently we do that, the more second nature it becomes when they actually have to respond to an emergency."