Valencia College Utilizes Various
Mass Notification Options Throughout Campus
Executive Summary
Valencia College is a top community college in Orlando, Florida. To address the safety of its growing student population, Valencia College has installed various mass notification devices across its several campuses. Talkaphone's WEBS Mass Notification Software highlights the new additions.
Ray Wittmier, interim chief of the University of Washington Police, thinks that multiple approaches to mass communication is the one best approach for the university.
“Everybody recognizes the need for a mass notification system,” he says, “but as we looked at that, we realized that the old, antiquated e-mail method really doesn’t cover everything we need. When we’re trying to send out a message to 65,000 people via one platform, it takes well over an hour. We need multiple ways to deliver that message.”
Challenges
Valencia College in Orlando, Fla., no doubt, has a stunning security infrastructure. It incorporates a multitude of mass notification, access control, and emergency communication layers. Tom Lopez, assistant vice president of safety, security, and risk management at Valencia, noticed something missing within the school’s mass notification tools and immediately set out to address it.
Talkaphone Solutions
“We had a void. All of the professional and expert recommendations we received pointed to multilayered mass notification systems. We were lacking in one of those layers. We needed external mass notification devices that could communicate with our campus population.”
So he installed outdoor area WEBS paging units to broadcast clear messages over vast areas. “We’ve used them to notify the campus of severe weather such as tornados. Obviously, in Florida, bad weather is a common occurrence. A lot of other institutions use sirens for mass notification. The problem with sirens it that the people who hear them don’t necessarily know what the signal means. With these paging units, we can create specific messages to address multiple scenarios. I like that.”
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