The University of Hawaii's emergency plans are getting graded by a crisis expert from the Virginia Tech massacre.

UH officials learned the school is on the right track but there are a couple of areas that need improvement.

On April 16, 2007, a mentally ill Virginia Tech student opened fire, killing 31 students and faculty before shooting himself . The school's director of counseling rushed to the dorm where the first two victims were killed.

"I worked with some of the students who were close to those victims and was with them when news of other shootings happened on campus so we were all sort of appalled that day," said Christopher Flynn, director of the Thomas Cook Counseling Center at Virginia Tech.

Flynn led the school's mental health response. Now he is using his experience to help improve UH's emergency plans which involve campus security.

"They do drills with HPD to practice scenarios like that and so we feel we're prepared in case we have to shut down the campus," said Gregg Takayama, director of communications for UH Manoa.

The university just tested new loudspeakers on campus security vehicles. A test alert also went out to students' cell phones and email accounts.

"They need to be redundant so if someone has their cell phone off, is not looking at email, how are they going to hear that? You need to think through that, and I think the folks at UH are doing a good job at anticipating that already," Flynn said.

But out of the approximately 50,000 students in the university system only a little more than 2,000 have signed up for the text message service so officials want to boost participation. They also hope to prevent a tragedy here by improving access to mental health services.

According to Takayama, national guidelines recommend 1 counselor for every 1,000 students and faculty but UH Manoa has 1 counselor for every 4,000 students and staff.

"We do need to do more in terms of funding our counseling program. We're very understaffed in our counseling center. They do a terrific job with the resources they have, which isn't much," Takayama said.

UH Manoa recently got funding for 2 of the 3 counseling staff positions they requested from the state legislature.

A public presentation on campus crisis management will be held on April 29 from 1:30 to 4:30 p.m. at UH Manoa's campus center ballroom.

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