By Shelly Willliams/editor-in-chief
TCC administrators were up at 4 a.m. Feb. 9 as they decided to close for the seventh day in two weeks after ice, snow and freezing temperatures hit North Texas again.
Originally, college officials posted an alert and sent out e-mails at 4:30 a.m. delaying classes until noon, but they met again to discuss weather conditions around 8 a.m. before sending more than 32,000 text alerts to students, faculty and staff stating the district would close for the rest of the day.
“Road conditions weren’t really drivable,” public information services coordinator Cacy Barnard said. “We weren’t for sure what the rest of the day would look like.”
But several students said they didn’t receive those alerts.
South student Laura Jordan said she signed up for weather alerts the first week of school. She received the first few sent out the week before Feb. 9 and stopped checking Campus-Cruiser for e-mails after putting her faith in the text alerts she already received.
“Well, that was a bad choice because they never came,” she said. “I asked someone what happened, and they said they were sent out and that I need to re-sign up for them because maybe I didn’t do it right. My question is now, if I didn’t do it right, then why did I get the first round of alerts?”
Another student, Mukul Patel, who is on NW and NE campuses this semester, said he signed up last year for the text alerts but didn’t receive his texts either.
“I checked the link which TCC posted on here [Facebook], and my cell number is the same. It showed active for the alert,” he said.
Barnard said reasons for students not receiving the alerts could involve an individual’s cell phone plan or their not entering the activation code sent from CampusCruiser when they signed up for the alerts.
But Patel said he re-entered his number and received and entered another activation code. This was before Wednesday’s closing.
“I’d love to know why. I have the same number, same carrier, same cell phone,” he said.
Barnard also said if students or staff hadn’t used their CampusCruiser account for close to a year, they may need to reactivate the alerts.
The best places to get accurate information on closures are TCC outlets such as the college’s website or social media pages via Facebook and Twitter, she said. Sometimes, news channels can receive thousands of calls about closings and can get information wrong, Barnard said after FOX 4 News announced the college was closed for the day though it was only delayed at the time. But this error was quickly corrected.
