CVCC lockdown: What worked, what needs work

Catawba Valley Community College officials are examining if their responses are good enough in a crisis.

CVCC’s administration spent much of Thursday analyzing the security measures that were in place Wednesday when a gunman was spotted on its east campus, to determine what worked and what needs to be changed.

“I’ll be doing a faculty and staff debriefing, and I’ll try to learn more from them,” said Garrett Hinshaw, president of CVCC. “I’ll be looking at how faculty and staff reacted, to see how we go forward from here.”

A faculty member on the east campus of CVCC saw a man with a handgun in his hands in the parking lot at 9:20 a.m. Wednesday. She notified campus security, who called the sheriff’s office and the Hickory Police Department. The east campus was placed on lockdown at 9:35 a.m., followed by the main campus at 10:12 a.m.

College and law enforcement officials have not given a firm reason for the timing of the main campus’ lockdown. However, Hickory Police Chief Tom Adkins said safety was their main concern.

“If you’re unsure where a suspect is, then you need to lock an area down,” he said. “Since we were unsure where the suspect went, the main campus was locked down. The No. 1 priority is the safety of the students and faculty.”

When the lockdown was issued on the east campus, there was a loud speaker notification, an alarm inside the building and on the loud speakers outside and in the parking lot, saying a code red was in place.

However, the first text and email notification to students and staff from the alert system didn’t go out until 10:47 a.m., 35 minutes after the main campus was placed on lockdown and 72 minutes after the east campus, according to information supplied by the college.

Students, staff and family members can sign up for alerts from CVCC through email, text messages, voicemail or any combination of those through the school’s website to get information about weather closings and campus emergencies.

The school was unable to send the alerts earlier because the school’s network was down, said Mary Miller Reynolds, communications director for CVCC.

“We did not have network access,” she said. “We were finally able to find mobile access with an AirCard to send the alerts out.”

Reynolds said CVCC first realized the network experienced a system failure on Tuesday morning, and it was unrelated to Wednesday’s event.

When alerts were sent out, many have said they received the text alerts or phone calls exactly as they should have. CVCC’s Facebook page is full of compliments to the college for the way they handled things, as well as students who received alerts. However, there are also numerous students who sounded off about not receiving any messages, despite signing up on the alert system.

Cortney Worley is one CVCC student who signed up for email, text and voicemail alerts. However, she did not receive texts from the college, and only received one email, which she saw Thursday morning. She primarily received automated phone calls from the school, saying the main campus was put on lockdown and no one was allowed on or off the campus.

“After I got the first one, they came every three minutes until 11 a.m., and then they stopped for a little while,” Worley said.

At home when she received the calls, Worley estimates she received more than a dozen phone calls from the campus between 10:30 a.m. and 4 p.m. Wednesday. The final one told her there would be classes as usual on Thursday.

Worley said she was glad that she received the phone calls and got some kind of notification from the school. But if she was on campus when this was happening, she would have preferred text messages. Worley said some of her friends who were trapped on campus did receive text messages from the college.

Hinshaw said he was unsure what happened with the alert system, saying that was one of the things CVCC would investigate going forward.

Students and staff are not automatically enrolled in the alert system when the sign up for classes for two reasons, he said.

“We don’t do it automatically because phone carriers charge for text messages and email is the least effective route in a crisis,” Hinshaw said. “We want to look at how we control information through a crisis. I can’t be specific about what we’ll do. We’re still exploring it and how we’ll move forward.”

As far as the college’s immediate reaction to a threat, Hinshaw said he is still going over the college’s entire response, from the initial code red alert to how quickly staff reacted.

“Faculty and staff gave a positive response to training we’d had. We’d done a community-wide training on campus before. There’s no way you’re ready for the real thing,” he said. “But everyone came out safe, and that was an accomplishment.”

Hinshaw credits training the staff underwent from Texas A&M about five years ago to getting the school ready for Wednesday’s event.

“We realized we weren’t where we needed to be. We rewrote some of our training policies, added cameras, alarm systems, big screen TVs for emergency notifications and locks on all the doors to be locked from the inside,” he said. “You don’t realize just how valuable some of these things are until you’re in a crisis situation.”