Imagine this: you were up late working on a paper for class, the alarm goes off at six for your eight o’ clock class. All you want to do is roll over and go back to sleep for another few hours. You get up, shower, and drink your coffee while driving to the campus. You arrive to discover that school was cancelled due to a loss of power in the area. Needless to say you are not very pleased to have gotten out of bed and driven to the campus, and later you discover that many of your friends received a text message and phone call that morning advising them of the closure. You wonder why they got notified and you did not. During the investigation you discover although every student is automatically enrolled into the SOU-Alert system, the information utilized to enroll a student is their SOU email address and the phone number provided to the school at the time of registration. If we were given your home phone number or a previous cell phone number, that is the number which will receive the alert phone call, not your current local number.
This is just one scenario in which the university may need to send out an emergency notification to students, staff and faculty. Many colleges and universities have similar notification systems. Unfortunately, there have been schools that had intruders or shooters on campus. They discovered when they were trying to notify students, staff, and faculty to shelter in place and follow their lock down policy, many individuals had not updated their contact information or signed up for the text messaging future and did not receive timely notification placing them at risk.
Please take the time to update your contact information and or sign up for the text-messaging feature. It is quick and easy to complete just go to go to My SOU and click on SOU-Alert. If you want more information regarding SOU-Alert visit the following FAQ link http://www.sou.edu/sou-alert/SOU-Alert-FAQs.pdf, http://www.sou.edu/sou-alert/Opt-in%20FAQ.pdf.
Heather Freiheit is the University’s Director of the EMHE Emergency Preparedness grant and will have future articles on how you can prepare for an emergency or disaster. Watch for her show around Emergency Preparedness airing on RVTV in early February.
