OUR VIEW: Schools’ new safety efforts are wise move

» SUMMARY: Germanna Community College made the right move by implementing an emergency text-messaging system.

April's mass shooting at Virginia Tech led officials at Germanna Community College to implement a new electronic messaging system to disseminate information quickly in the case of an emergency.

Friday's shootings at Delaware State University also underscore the need for preparedness on our college campuses.

The e2Campus system implemented by GCC will notify about 4,000 students, faculty and staff of weather-related closures or crisis situations.

Obviously, we hope the system is used only to let the GCC community know about snow days, but it's at least comforting to know there's a system in place for man-made disasters.

And the price isn't too bad either. The rapid-notification program costs about $3,000 annually to inform roughly 4,000 people in the college community.

The system also includes a one-time cost of $2,000 associated with a program to post emergency information on large LCD screens on all three GCC campuses.

Compare that to the SchoolMessenger program recently implemented by Culpeper County Public Schools, which costs about $20,000 a year. The price varies based on enrollment. (CCPS had 7,333 students as of Sept. 5.)

Also, it should be noted that SchoolMessenger includes notices to parents about such things as absenteeism as well as closures and crisis situations.

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, and we believe systems like e2Campus and SchoolMessenger can help prevent even more chaos in the event of a crisis at one of our local campuses.