Elizabeth City State University students in a 1 p.m. foreign policy lecture were given quite a scare last Friday when a man brandishing a gun walked into a classroom and threatened those gathered in it.
Not to worry, though: It was just a test.
The North Carolina university tested its emergency preparedness system by sending a mock armed intruder into the classroom last week, according to an ECSU press release. Students, faculty and staff, the release stated, were notified five days in advance that there would be an unspecified emergency response drill that day.
Several people in the class, however, may have been unaware of the exact nature of the drill because a mass e-mail and text message alert -- designed to once again notify students of the nature of the event -- was sent out only as the drill was beginning, the release stated.
"This is a test," the e-mail and text message alert read, according to the release. "ECSU is holding a test drill where an armed intruder will enter a room in Moore Hall and be detained by Campus Police."
Anthony Brown, ECSU vice chancellor for student affairs, stated the importance of preparing for emergencies in the release, noting "student safety and campus security is a concern for all of us, and measures must be taken to test the preparedness of our emergency crisis systems."
ECSU Chancellor Willie J. Gilchrist further defended the university's actions, stating in the release that the test was informative.
"We did not inform that particular class per se, but it was a learning experience beyond table top experiences where every person knows what is going to happen next," he stated. "Unfortunately we learned lessons from frightened students that result when live scenarios are carried out. However, we want our campus to be ready in case of such an event."
The system being tested by ECSU was the recently installed Public Information Emergency Response System, designed to spread messages on campus to students as quickly as possible, the release stated.
According to Marc Mullen, senior vice president of PIER systems, PIER is a "comprehensive communications management tool designed to let people quickly create communications."
PIER allows its users to generate a message quickly and choose which groups to send it to, Mullen noted, adding that PIER also recommends testing this system for efficiency.
"Any organization that wants to be prepared for disaster has to practice; it's common to put together a mock scenario," Mullen noted. "The challenge comes in making sure people watching or not watching the test know what's happening."
In the event of an emergency drill on Grounds, all persons involved would have proper and complete notification, according to Marjorie Sidebottom, director of University emergency preparedness.
"We will exercise our plans but we would want to make sure that people have the appropriate information," Sidebottom said. "We would likely send out more than one notification if we were going to plan an exercise like that."
Sidebottom added that if the University were to plan an drill like the one at ECSU, steps would be taken to make sure no one would be left in the dark.
"There would be numerous messages that would go out in a variety of different ways to ensure the population understood what we were exercising and when we were exercising," she said, adding that a test would not be compromised by this release of information.
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