Tuesday’s very rare stabbing incident is a reminder that many of our security preparations on campus are working well, but need to be pushed forward in some areas. One of those is student and staff notifications.

If this had been a more widespread threat to the security of students and staff on campus, we need a quick and simple way to contact all students and staff, and issue lockdown or evacuation instructions.

There are companies selling big and expensive text messaging systems, so we could send a mass text message to students, and we haven’t moved forward on those because of the expense.

But here’s something we can do for free, and I’ll be proposing this at our next board meeting: let’s create a Sierra College Emergency Message account on Twitter for each of our campuses. The incident commander and site administrator for each campus would have access and could send messages.

We then publicize the accounts to our students and staff, and allow them to sign up for a free Twitter account and enable mobile alerts to be sent to their cell phones.

While this doesn’t ensure 100% participation among students, it’s completely free, and I’d venture to bet that our participation rates would be sky-high. I don’t see why we wouldn’t do it.