Preparing for a Perfect Storm through Cooperation
Virginia Tidewater Consortium for Higher Education: Building a Future on the Foundation of its Past with Emergency Preparedness
By Rob Minearo

Preparing for a “Perfect Storm” with a comprehensive emergency preparedness plan requires a close-up view of the building blocks that created a powerhouse cooperative endeavor like that of the Virginia Tidewater Consortium for Higher Education.
     
The building blocks that are the foundation of the Virginia Tidewater Consortium are not unlike the Virginia red brick that make up its fifteen prestigious member institutions. The building blocks were laid one by one with the hard work and dedication of the Consortium’s executive director, staff, and member presidents.
     
Emergency preparedness has been a cornerstone program of the Virginia Tidewater Consortium since 9/11. To better appreciate the challenges in developing a cooperative emergency preparedness program we could look back to the beginning of the Consortium.
       
The first building block of the Consortium was laid in 1972 when the Virginia State Legislature instituted mandatory higher education consortia for all state colleges.
     
The State Council on Higher Education wanted to reduce duplication of off-campus credit courses among state-supported institutions for higher education.
     
Virginia was geographically divided into six regions, with the Virginia Tidewater Consortium managing the Hampton Roads area.
     
A year after the Consortium was formed in 1973 with eight colleges there was a changing of the guard when Lawrence Dotolo, a Ph.D. in English and professor at Old Dominion University, took over as the new president. He was singled out to develop the Consortium’s potential because of his past experience leveraging resources and creating cooperative endeavors with adult education at local churches. 
     
Beginning with only off-campus courses, he eventually brought academic groups together to create new cooperative programs for the Consortium’s members, such as expanding library privileges, cross registration, and faculty development programs. As the Consortium grew, more institutions, including private colleges, wanted to join.
     
One of Dr. Dotolo’s earliest challenges was to raise awareness of the many benefits of cooperative endeavors with the senior executive staff at the Consortium’s member institutions. Each member college needed to rise above its traditionally competitive view, to understand that by working together they would strengthen their position in academia.
     
In 1979 the Consortium won a federal grant to establish an effective continuing education program that reached out to low-socio-economic adults in Virginia, helping them secure a post-secondary education. Grants and other outside funding, most of which are specific to a particular program, make up around forty percent of the Consortium’s $750,000 annual budget, with its member colleges being its core-funding vehicle.
     
The Consortium’s continuing education program has been one of the most successful federally funded programs in the United States, assisting around 3,000 adults a year in their postsecondary education, with approximately 1,500 enrolled in post-secondary education. When asked to name their highest priority Dr. Roseann Runte, chair of the Board of Directors of the Consortium and president of Old Dominion University, summed up the responses of most member presidents: “We make dreams come true.”
     
Working with its member colleges and communities to establish a better educated work force strengthens the local economy, and this in turn establishes strong partnerships with businesses and civic organizations. In 1980 Cox Communications, working with the Consortium, established a local cable channel dedicated to higher education that is viewed in 425,000 homes in southern Virginia. This higher education cable channel has been a successful community outreach program for the Consortium’s members.
           
Over time each cornerstone program laid by the Consortium built upon its success. For instance, the faculty development program added certificate courses and training for the faculty during the semester to enhance their in-class teaching abilities.
           
Cross registration at each of the fifteen member colleges was initially a challenge for the Consortium, mainly because the registrars saw too many inconsistencies in courses that were being offered at different institutions. However, this obstacle was overcome and today cross registration is one of the most successful programs. Students who participate in the cross registration program are offered home campus credit, within certain parameters, at any public or private member college. The Consortium supplies the cross registration forms to students, but the registrars and advisers now set the tone for the program.
     
The Consortium’s cooperative library program allows students to check out books at any of the fifteen member colleges. Working with librarians, the Consortium issues library cards and establishes professional standards. The Consortium also offers professional development programs to the librarians. Participating librarians have taken the lead and are now managing the day-to-day operation with less involvement with the Consortium. 
     
Securing a safe environment for them to learn is imperative for the students to realize their goals. During the eighties the Consortium and its member colleges saw a need to overcome the drinking culture on their campuses. By establishing a substance abuse prevention program, which included a peer educator certificate program for participating students, member colleges worked together to combat what they felt was an escalating problem not only on their campuses but nationally. The college presidents felt that this was more than just a liability and public relations issue; it was also a trust issue. Each campus is entrusted with students’ well being, and the Consortium and its member colleges take that trust very seriously.     
       
The Virginia State Legislature rescinded the mandatory consortia requirements in 1992 for all state-funded higher education institutions, and most of the other consortia went out of business. The Virginia Tidewater Consortium survived because of the many important cooperative programs it was facilitating with its member colleges, and because these joint activities were creating successful results.

Emergency Preparedness
The tragedy that struck New York City, our nation, and the world on September 11, 2001, brought to light that the world had changed. The Virginia Tidewater Consortium for Higher Education met the difficult new challenges by building on its past experiences, with a comprehensive joint emergency preparedness program for its member colleges.
     
Before 9/11 the Consortium was more concerned with the simpler issue of internal campus security, and it had already implemented basic information workshops with local law enforcement for its member institutions. After 9/11 Dr. Dotolo and his member presidents saw the urgent need for emergency planning on a much larger scale.
     
The college presidents appointed a key member to head up the emergency preparedness committee and to collect member colleges’ current emergency preparedness plans. This gave the committee an overall view of the different procedures established by the colleges over the years, as well a starting point to compare plans that might work and to modify plans that were now obsolete.
     
They outlined a practical hierarchy of the probable and possible disasters facing member colleges. Following 9/11 the Committee immediately saw the need to consider terrorism a primary concern, especially as the member colleges are close to the world’s largest naval base, Norfolk Navy Base.
     
Because of the large amount of domestic and international shipping in the area, chemical and biological hazards and risk of foreign illness, such as avian flu, were also possibilities, to be written into its emergency preparedness plan.
     
However, after reconsidering the probability of different disasters, hurricanes became number one on its list. Most of the Consortium’s members are along a primary hurricane route. This natural disaster was a probability rather than a possibility.
     
After developing a cooperative emergency preparedness plan among its member colleges, the Consortium had an enormous amount of information, and in November 2003, felt that it was time to put together a conference to share its findings with academia. The two-day conference on security and emergency preparedness for higher education grew beyond the Consortium’s expectations, with many institutions both in-state and out-of-state attending. The conference highlighted the great need for comprehensive and decisive emergency procedures.
     
One of the major speakers at the conference was Dr. Louanne Kennedy, provost at the University of California, Northridge. She outlined in detail the challenges the university faced during the seven years it took to recover after the 1994 Northridge Earthquake, one of the costliest natural disasters in U.S. history, devastated the region. Unforeseen problems that popped up were at the top of her list. The university had lost students’ records in the quake, communicating with students and staff became a big challenge, and many of the students could not be immediately located.
     
Dr. Conrad Festa, the provost of the College of Charleston, spoke at the conference of that college’s experience when Hurricane Hugo swept through the South Carolina with 140-mph winds, devastating everything in its wake.
     
The keynote event at the conference was a discussion with two senior executive officers from the Manhattan campus of St. John’s University, which is located near New York’s Twin Towers. As with UC Northridge, the unpredictable situations that arose after the 9/11 disaster created the greatest challenges in response and recovery. Having a cooperative emergency preparedness plan in place allows more effective use of resources in dealing with these unforeseen situations.
     
Local Virginia state agencies, vendors, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) also participated at the conference. Reaching out to the state agencies that specialize in emergency procedures assures that the college plans encompass local concerns, and connecting with companies that supply higher education with emergency products and services will help better prepare a college should disaster strike.

Following the conference the Consortium quickly set up on-going disaster-training workshops for all its member colleges. Because of economies of scale the Consortium was able to put together programs that were cost effective.
       
In September 2003 Hurricane Isabel became the first test of the Consortium’s cooperative emergency preparedness plan and training. Isabel was a Category Two hurricane when it landed in North Carolina, and it packed a devastating punch to the lower East Coast states, but as powerful as Isabel was it didn’t even compare to Hurricane Katrina’s Category Four destruction on the Gulf States two years later.
     
The experience of the Consortium’s member colleges with Isabel showed the strengths and weaknesses of the newly established emergency plans. After Isabel hit, many of the member colleges were out of business for as long as two weeks. Power lines were down and fallen trees caused day-to-day challenges just getting about. Communicating with students became a big challenge as the member colleges worked their way out of the rubble. Maintaining communications systems should be a key component to emergency preparedness plans for any kind of disaster. A college’s ability to communicate effectively and in a timely manner with its faculty, staff, and students is critical to the well being of the college.
     
Feeding and housing students became a serious issue with a few of the member colleges. After a week they ran out of food, and those colleges with generators ran out of fuel. Challenges like these are not easily resolved by individual institutions, but consolidating food, fuel, and other necessary supplies within the framework of a consortium helps to smooth the path to recovery for member colleges.
     
During and after a disaster a well-organized and prepared faculty and staff must be maintained on campus to contend with emergencies. However, a college needs to consider that most faculty and staff are going to face a divided loyalty to their families and to the college, and family emergencies might pull employees away from their posts during a catastrophe. The personal needs of faculty and staff must be considered when creating an emergency preparedness plan.
     
For example, when a minor hurricane moved through southern Florida a few years earlier, local colleges were able to fix windows and clean up the debris in a matter of two weeks. However, many students, faculty, and staff did not show up at the colleges for several weeks because local elementary schools were still closed, and college employees and students had no place to drop off their children. Many of the colleges affected met the needs of their students, faculty, and staff by instituting temporary day care and elementary education programs for children. These support programs were written permanently into their emergency preparedness plans.
     
The list of unplanned challenges encountered by higher education institutions goes on and on. The Virginia Tidewater Consortium is closing the gap between its emergency preparedness plan and the unforeseen variables by continually obtaining good information from all sources, and with on-going training.
     
One of the most important questions that grew from disaster planning was, “How long could a college be closed after a disaster, without suffering extreme financial and emotional harm, and can we manage the unforeseen variables?” Dr. Dotolo and his presidents reached out to other institutions that had suffered similar experiences to try to better assess these questions.
     
Establishing how long any college can close down and then reopen without a devastating effect is both an individual challenge and a challenge for the group. Each college needs to take a good look at its budget and evaluate how close to the margin they are operating. A state college that relies mostly on state funds would likely be able to withstand a longer downtime than a private college, which relies primarily on tuition.
     
If a college is relying on adjunct professors to teach many of its classes and it is shut down for an extended period of time, the part-time professors might possibly move somewhere else to obtain new jobs. Students leaving the state for other colleges in the interim, or leaving college altogether when an institution is shut down, also are concerns that needs to be addressed within an institution’s emergency preparedness plan.
       
Working collectively, member colleges of the Consortium are establishing standards in their emergency preparedness plans for many of these variables. With the advancement of storage technology most of the Tidewater member colleges now store back-up student and university information offsite, some in western Roanoke, Virginia, about 1,000 feet above sea level in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Mark Dreyfus, President of ECPI College of Technology commented, “If flood waters were to advance to Roanoke we would all be in trouble.”
       
The Virginia Tidewater Consortium is also reaching out beyond its own collective endeavors to include other higher education consortia in its emergency planning process. In addition to heading the Consortium, Dr. Dotolo is the executive director of the Association for Consortium Leadership, a national organization setting trends in higher education consortia. He is working with ACL members to secure temporary homes for students of his member colleges should a long-term statewide shutdown occur.
     
One of the many significant benefits that a consortium brings to the table is that as a unit it can try to anticipate the needs of each member college and to set in place plans for each member institution to help the others during a disaster. It can also leverage its resources by collectively purchasing emergency equipment, thus avoiding unnecessary duplication of expense.
     
A regrettable but important example of member college cooperation took place after a campus police officer was stabbed to death at a member institution. The other member schools sent staff from their police force to help out and to insure the security of the campus for the students.
     
The Virginia Tidewater Consortium is working continually to predict and evaluate different scenarios that might occur during a disaster. Just recently it staged a mock hurricane exercise, with each member playing a critical role. One of the member institutions provided the Consortium with field reports and a realistic video simulating hurricane updates from a weather channel studio.
     
Before 9/11 and before Hurricane Katrina, many colleges and universities throughout the United States created emergency preparedness plans that were modeled in the event of a “perfect storm” hitting the institution, and then filed the plans away. After the many catastrophic events occurring on our nation’s campuses in the last few years, it has become clear that there is no such thing as a “perfect storm,” and therefore no “perfect” emergency procedure plan covering all situations. For an institution to be truly prepared for whatever disaster might befall it, it will need to follow the lead of groups like the Virginia Tidewater Consortium for Higher Education, and continually reinvent itself in order to meet, and to rise above, the inevitable challenges ahead.   

Rob Minearo is the publisher of Higher Education Consortia magazine, and has worked in the publishing, communications, and business development industry for more than twenty-five years. He can be reached at (860) 429-0420, or at rob@collegebenefitspublishing.com.