SMU installs loudspeakers to warn of campus threats

Loudspeakers command students at Saint Mary’s University: “Please remain in your classroom.”

It’s not a fire drill.  It’s a new campus-security measure at the Halifax school. It’s called the emergency broadcast system, which plays a message over the school’s public address system to alert students, faculty and staff of an on-campus threat.

It’s becoming a trend. In Montreal in September, the Concordia University student newspaper reported that campus security had hired an “investigator/preventionist” for its security team.  In March, Dalhousie University implemented its own broadcast system in the form of mass text messaging. 

And Queens University in Kingston, Ont. added an email alert system in April, due to “an increase in thefts, security alerts and reports of suspicious persons on campus,” according to the school’s website.

Gary Schmeisser, director of facilities management at Saint Mary’s, says the university went with a broadcast system because it made the most sense for a campus of its size. 

Though he declined to reveal a total, the broadcast system, he says, cost about $15 per student and staff member. This would place the cost of the system as high as $130,000, based on Saint Mary’s enrolment of 8,500 plus students and nearly 400 staff members.  The money, said Schmeisser, came from the school’s operating budget and was not passed on to students.

Yet many Saint Mary’s students considered their campus to be safe before the installation of the broadcast system, which has outfitted the fire alarms with loudspeaker capabilities and added speakers to the exterior of the school.

Jessica Martin, a psychology major in her second year, describes what it was like to hear the broadcast test.

“I remember being in class, and it wasn’t anything like a fire drill.  It was a voice telling us to stay in our class.  It was annoying, just because we were in the middle of a test.”

“Saint Mary’s is very much a small school,” says Tim Villermet, a third-year political science major. “But if my safety was threatened, I’d rely on my own intelligence and capabilities rather than the institution.  I look out for myself.”

Bill Promaine, manager of campus security at Saint Mary’s, says the system was not a response to any specific incident.

“I think the experience from across the U.S. and Canada indicates that there is a need to communicate quickly with our students and communities in the area,” says Promaine.  “It’s essentially a response to what’s happening in North America and across the world.”

A shooting in Finland that left eleven people dead in September and a Malton, Ont. school went into lockdown after a drive-by shooting in the neighbourhood ten days earlier are both examples of such threats. A violent rampage at Virginia Tech in 2007, which left 33 people dead, has not been forgotten.

“It’s been a trend that all universities have a good emergency management system,” Schmeisser said, “given the incidents we’ve had over the past ten years or so.”

Comments on this story are now closed