Overview: SDSU Ready Day
“One is to test our emergency communications system to ensure that the system is operational and reaches students, faculty, and staff through multiple modalities,” Mays stated. “Second, it is to help ensure that our campus community is aware of the ways that the university will communicate when activating emergency communications, and safety precautions they should take.”
An active shooter showing up at a school campus, business, entertainment event etc., can be one of the most frightening ordeals one can go through in life.
While such occurrences are not the norm, they are still worth preparing for.
San Diego State University will do that on Thursday, holding its Ready Day event.
Last semester’s event focused on general emergency preparedeness on campus. Thursday’s event will deal with how best to prepare in the event of an active shooter or shooters appearing on campus.
San Diego State University Associate Vice President for Public Safety and Community Empowerment, Josh Mays, noted, “San Diego State University has a longstanding commitment to emergency preparedness and campus safety. As part of the university’s proactive safety measures, for years, the university has routinely tested its emergency communication system and rolled out the SDSU Safe App in 2022. The 2025-26 academic year is the first time such testing efforts were branded SDSU Ready Day.”
As Mays sees it, the SDSU Ready Day event focuses in on a pair of goals.
“One is to test our emergency communications system to ensure that the system is operational and reaches students, faculty, and staff through multiple modalities,” Mays stated. “Second, it is to help ensure that our campus community is aware of the ways that the university will communicate when activating emergency communications, and safety precautions they should take.”
Thursday’s event will encourage engagement with SDSU’s active shooter training video and add to familiarization with the specific language used in university emergency communications during an active shooter incident.
“During the university-wide test of the university’s emergency communications system on Feb. 19, students, faculty, and staff at SDSU and SDSU Imperial Valley receive and see non-emergency emails, text messages, digital signage, web updates, and social media content,” Mays went on to say. “During an urgent incident or emergency situation, the university will also publish these real-time alerts, which will be time-stamped with the time they were sent, on urgent.sdsu.edu. The redundancy of these communications is deliberate to ensure that accurate, timely information is shared as broadly as possible.”
SDSU covers an array of preparedness needs
Before SDSU Ready Day, the university’s regular emergency communications tests had been managed and led by the San Diego State University Police Department (UPD), the Division of Information Technology, and Strategic Communications and Public Affairs.
Also at the start of each academic semester in past years, the university has also launched a communications campaign to encourage faculty, staff, and students to ensure that their contact information, including their personal cell phone number, is on file with the university. This helps to ensure that they receive timely text-based communications when the university sends emergency text messages.
Also, SDSU regularly, throughout the academic year, promotes the university’s wide array of safety resources for the campus community, including the active shooter training video developed by UPD, the SDSU Safe app, reporting mechanisms online and via the mobile app, and the offices that aid with prevention and response plans.
“Preparedness efforts like SDSU Ready Day are intended to build familiarity, clarity, and confidence, not fear, so that students, faculty, and staff know what to expect and how to respond if an emergency occurs,” Mays added.