The university’s notification system failed to provide a timely alert for students in a shooting event that occurred across the street from campus.

It took 50 minutes, from the time that Emporia State police officers arrived on scene to the time the emergency alert was sent out.

The university is insisting that it was a timely warning because it was sent out within 10 minutes of the Emporia Police Chief calling Captain Hoover, of ESU Police and Safety.

But shouldn’t the administration be concerned about the time that students are in danger?

Besides, ESU police were on site 50 minutes before the alert, and Hoover never even bothered to show up.

He was at home.

A shooting happened across the street from campus.

Witnesses were housed in Cram Science Building.

But Hoover didn’t show up.

As students, we expect to be notified in a timely manner when a tragic event happens either on campus or near enough for there to be a serious concern to the students’ well-being.

Students’ lives could have been in jeopardy and no one alerted the campus.

When the school fails to let students know about serious events such as a shooting the moment it happens, the school lets down all the students who attend ESU and live in the surrounding area.

What would have happened if the shooter gave the cops the slip and made their way on campus? Students would have not known until it was too late.

The whole system needs to be rethought and redone. At the end of the day, the students’ lives should be of the utmost concern to the administration, but it’ll take a lot to re-establish the trust that was created when students agreed to come to ESU.

While the Emergency Notification Team took time to reexamine the policy, and hopefully discover why it was so slow, on March 17th, they did not allow the public or the media to attend the meeting.

The communication from the administration is so incomplete that it misleads the public about the facts of what is actually going on and what actually happened. This is wrong.

It is difficult to know what is going on, or to trust what is happening, when we don’t even know who is involved and no updates are given to the public.

We ask Hornet Nation to be vigilant. The administration cannot be trusted to deliver the facts in a transparent and fair way.

Because minutes do matter.