Opinion Board | A suitable measure

On April 16, 2007 Seung-Hui Cho, a senior English major at Virginia Tech, gunned down 32 of his fellow students and professors before killing himself.

Students at Penn, and Americans in general, were enraged and distraught by the senseless massacre.

Many rightfully questioned Virginia Tech's management of the crisis, wondering how many lives could have been saved had the university warned students and locked down campus immediately after the initial murders were discovered.

But less than six months later, for most of us the searing shock and pain of the murders have abated - just another incomprehensible tragedy to be filed away in the American psyche.

Fortunately, Penn officials weren't willing to just let that happen. The University should be applauded for their implementation of the new emergency notification system, PennAlert.

The new system provides Penn officials with the ability to send out simultaneous alerts in times of emergency through text messages, voicemails and e-mails.

For better or for worse, most students are permanently attached to their cell phones, and text message alerts would be an incredibly effective way to communicate critical information to those on campus in the event of a crisis.

PennAlert isn't perfect.

It requires students to register their cell-phone numbers through Penn InTouch and the University hasn't done an adequate job of publicizing this fact. It's buried in the campus-wide e-mail the administration sent out - which most students probably skimmed or didn't open - and doesn't appear prominently enough on the Penn InTouch Web site.

Penn should be promoting PennAlert on Locust Walk (as morbid as that may sound) and have ITA's register students when they set up their wireless networks.

In the meantime, we urge you to log onto Penn InTouch and register your cell-phone number. It's worth the 30 seconds of your time.

We hope that there will never be a repeat of the Virginia Tech massacre - not on this campus, nor on any other. But it's comforting to know that with PennAlert, the University has taken the necessary measures to protect its students in case there is.

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