If classes were canceled tomorrow, more than 5,000 students, faculty and staff would be texted immediately.
Ohio University now will optimize its emergency texting system to notify students and school employees when the Athens campus is closed, said David Hopka, assistant vice president for Safety and Risk Management.
In addition to television, Web sites and the radio, texting will be another means to reach students quickly, said Chief Information Officer Brice Bible.
The goal is to use as many mediums you can to get the message out
he said.
Bible said he hopes students will pass the details on to friends quicker if they receive a text.
If you get a message about the university closing my generation at least would send the message on Bible said of texting.
Bible met with Hopka, Senior Vice President for Finance and Administration Bill Decatur, Interim Executive Director of University Marketing and Communication Gina Calcamuggio and Vice President of Student Affairs Kent Smith about three days after the storm that shut down OU to assess the university's response.
After discussing how the storm knocked out more power in Athens County than was known earlier that day, it was a unanimous decision to begin texting students, Hopka said.
We knew there were a lot of folks who could not be reached by the methodology on the day of the storm
Hopka said. Many other schools already have the system in place, he added.
OU administrators considered sending a text the morning of the storm to inform students about canceled classes, Hopka said, but did not realize the full extent of power outages and did not want to abuse the text message service. Because the last snow day before this year was 2003, he said that should not be a problem.
We did not want people to feel like we're intruding or sending them too many texts
Hopka said.
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Ryan Dunn
