Soon, students will have the capability to receive campus safety announcements and alerts on their cell phones.

New campus safety procedures were announced at Wednesday’s Chancellor’s Liaisons meeting, including text messaging notification and an early-alert system.

According to David Rainer, associate vice chancellor of Environmental Health and Public Safety, communication is key to preventing a safety disaster, like the Virginia Tech shooting, from happening on campus.

“One of our most important tools is communication,” Rainer said at the meeting. “We’re training and improving on that.”

He said the text messaging notification system will be deployed in “a month or so,” but its effectiveness will depend on students’ participation.

“The text messaging notification will not work if students don’t register for it,‚Äù Rainer said. “They’ll have to give us their cell phone numbers and keep those numbers updated.”

He said at other universities that have implemented a text messaging system, less than 50 percent of students have signed up for the service.

Bobby Mills, student body president and a junior in political science, said it is important for students to participate in this new program.

“The biggest thing is to go out and encourage people to load their [cell] phone numbers up into the system and make sure they do that,” he said. “They should make sure people do that their freshman year.”

Another new safety feature coming to campus is an early-warning system, using outdoor P.A.s. The alerts and warnings will be heard across campus as voice messages or “siren tones.”

“If a student hears the siren, that’s a signal to them that they need to do something,” Rainer said. “They need to get information about the situation.”

A third layer of added security is installation of liaisons in all occupied campus buildings. Rainer said back-up liaisons have also been appointed if someone is unavailable. These new campus safety measures are a response to the Virginia Tech massacre.

Rainer said the University has a well-defined emergency plan, and all Campus Police officers are trained to handle an “active shooter” emergency.

“We’ve run many table-top drills on campus, and have done a lot of real-time training,” he said.

According to Rainer, Campus Police has undergone training to handle emergency situations, such as a train derailment and a terrorist attack at Carter-Finely Stadium.

Rainer said he wants to avoid missing opportunities to catch a disaster before it happens on campus. He said he recalled hearing that a staff member at Virginia Tech saw a bomb threat posted on a door and didn’t notify the university police.

Rainer also said a Virginia Tech graduate student left Norris Hall to get coffee the morning of the shooting, returned and noticed all of the doors to the building were chained shut. He said instead of going to university police, she climbed through a window to get inside of the building.

“There were a lot of missed opportunities the morning of the Virginia Tech massacre,” he said. “We have got to avoid that.” Rainer said one key way to avoid missing opportunities is to alert authorities of suspicious behaviors or activities.

“Some students are worried about ‘squealing’ on other students who may be posing risks to the community,” he said. “We need to change the way that we think.”

According to Rainer, too much information about Seung-Hui Cho, the shooter at Virginia Tech, was held in private.

He proposed investigating student records, and medical records for students “on the edge,” in order to prevent “something like that” from happening again.

Tom Stafford, vice chancellor of student affairs, added he would like a ‚”single place” where students, faculty and staff can go to report someone who they feel is a threat to campus.

Mills agreed with this proposal, recalling a talk he had with a troubled student recently.

“I met with a student last week, and I could tell that he was not only a threat to himself, but I thought he might be a threat to campus, and I thought, ‘well where do I go?'” he said.

He suggested having counselors communicate with Campus Police, and also talk with professors about risky students.

“We need to get that awareness up,” Mills said.