Cardinal Points

Issue date: 9/28/07 Section: News

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A masked gunman has entered your building.

A sudden blackout has left the entire campus in total darkness.

A strange intruder has just shown up in your residence hall.

What do you do?

After Nov. 1, Keith Tyo said he hopes every student and faculty member at Plattsburgh State will know the answer.

Tyo, PSUC's executive assistant to the president, has been working on a new computerized alert system designed to notify the entire campus of emergency situations in approximately 30 seconds.

Now, after nearly three months of planning, the new system is almost ready to be unveiled.

"Right now, we're looking to get this system running within the next month," Tyo said. "It's our hope to have the system tested and in full operation in every classroom at Plattsburgh State by that time, if not before then."

The system, Tyo said, is part of an effort to improve the emergency alert procedures on all SUNY campuses. Just a few weeks after Seung-Hui Cho burst into a series of classrooms and murdered 32 people at Virginia Tech University this spring, then-SUNY Chancellor John Ryan was summoned to address the New York State Legislature about safety measures in place at SUNY schools. Ryan hurriedly assembled a committee to review the current SUNY security procedures and recommend necessary changes to make campus alert systems more efficient.

PSUC Chemistry professor Edward Miller remembers being summoned "practically overnight" to become one of 16 campus representatives on the chancellor's new Task Force on Critical Incident Management.

"It was a very hurried process at first," Miller said. "It seemed like I was in Albany two minutes after I was asked to join the group. We didn't have much time to work, as the chancellor was summoned to speak before the legislature within a couple of weeks."

Yet even with the time constraints, Miller said, the task force's end product was valuable.

"We learned a lot about things we never knew about, and were forced to think about things we never wanted to think about happening on our campuses," Miller said, adding that he had never thought about the prospect of a school shooting at PSUC until attending these meetings. "In the end, we realized that there is no single solution. It has to be a multi-layered change."

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