MONTCLAIR, N.J. — It was after 1 a.m. on a Sunday when college freshman Amanda Phillips arrived at the train station. She was nervous about walking alone in the dark to her dorm at Montclair State University.
So Phillips activated a GPS tracking device on her school-issued cellphone that would instantly alert campus police to her whereabouts if she didn’t turn it off in 20 minutes.
After a five-minute walk, she safely reached her dorm room, locked the door behind her and turned off the timer.
“I think this is a great idea. It makes me feel a lot safer. And it’s not even that expensive,” said Phillips, an 18-year-old from Delaware.
Had she not turned the device off, an alarm would have sounded at the campus police station and a computer screen would have displayed a dot with her location, her photo and other personal details.
Montclair is one of the first schools in the U.S. to use GPS tracking devices, which along with other security technology are increasingly being adopted in the wake of the Virginia Tech massacre last spring.
Students can use the timer or, in an emergency, activate the GPS technology to instantly alert police.
“Maybe they’re hiding and are hurt. Maybe they wouldn’t want to talk because they’re hiding behind a desk and the gunman’s in the room. They’d have a better chance of being located,” said campus police Sgt. Paul Giardino.
So far, not many students are using the feature. The university, which has 13,000 undergraduates, said the timers get turned on only about five to 10 times a week.
In the little more than a year that the system has been fully operational, the alarms have gone off only about once per month, and it was a false alarm every time, usually because someone forgot to turn off a timer.
Giardino said the false alarms aren’t nuisances — they are training opportunities for the 32-member police force. “I can get my guys to get out and learn how to handle these,” he said.
While students praise the safety features, some grumble that the phones are mandatory and that they must be bought through the school for $210 per semester, on top of tuition and fees totaling more than $7,600 a year.
The phones come with free, unlimited text messaging, the capability to read campus e-mail, free calls after 7 p.m., free calls to other Sprint phones, and 50 minutes per month of anytime talking.
Montclair State said it is not making money. It said the total cost is about $2 million per year — almost what the school collects from students.
Raju Rishi, co-founder of Rave Wireless, said a half-dozen other schools, including nearby Fairleigh Dickinson University and the University of North Carolina, use similar systems.
Rishi said campus police are not monitoring the movements of students who don’t turn on the GPS feature.
“There’s no Big Brother,” Rishi said. “You need a subpoena to locate somebody against their will.”
