Campus Alert Archive
Middlebury

"THIS IS A DRILL" in All Caps: Middlebury College's First-Ever Shelter-in-Place Drill

VTotheradvisoryhigh confidence

On Friday, December 6, 2024 at 1:50 PM EST, Middlebury College conducted its first-ever campus-wide shelter-in-place drill — a 15-minute exercise to test the Midd Alert emergency notification system and familiarize the campus community with shelter-in-place terminology. The verbatim alert text used 'THIS IS A DRILL' in all caps at both ends of the message — a documentation-quality example of how universities signal exercise traffic versus real emergencies.

Alerts
1
Response
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Killed
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Injured
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Institution
Middlebury College
Private Liberal Arts · VT
~2,865 studentsMidd Alert
Confirmed Timeline

Alert Sequence

1 message in sequence · 1 verified verbatim

INITIAL ALERTSMS
Verified verbatimMiddlebury College Midd Stories — official pre-drill announcement that published the exact alert text to be sent on December 6128 chars
Midd Alert – Urgent - This is a Shelter in Place DRILL. Seek shelter in the nearest building away from windows. THIS IS A DRILL.
Verbatim from the [Midd Stories pre-drill announcement](https://www.middlebury.edu/stories/archive/2024/11/shelter-place-drill-set-december-6) — Middlebury published the alert wording in advance so the community could recognize it as a drill
'DRILL' appears three times: once capitalized in 'Shelter in Place DRILL,' and once in the bookending all-caps 'THIS IS A DRILL' at the end
Uses an em-dash and the word 'Urgent' as the second-position field — preserving the visual recognizability of a real Midd Alert while making the drill nature unambiguous
127 characters — fits SMS single-segment limits
Context

Background

Middlebury College is a private liberal arts college of approximately 2,865 students in Middlebury, Vermont. On November 21, 2024, the college announced that it would conduct its first-ever campus-wide shelter-in-place drill on Friday, December 6, 2024, from 1:50 to 2:05 PM EST. The college publicly pre-released the exact alert wording — 'Midd Alert – Urgent - This is a Shelter in Place DRILL. Seek shelter in the nearest building away from windows. THIS IS A DRILL.' — so the community would recognize the message as a test rather than a real emergency. The 15-minute drill was the first in what became a recurring program of shelter-in-place exercises at Middlebury, with subsequent drills on May 2, 2025, July 24, 2025, and September 25, 2025. Middlebury's program represents a notable institutional choice for a NESCAC liberal arts college: Williams College had not conducted equivalent campus-wide drills as of 2024, and Bowdoin's post-Lewiston safety response leaned more heavily on building access controls than on practice drills.
Analysis

Key Findings

Documented example of a 'system test / drill' campus alert — fills a gap in the archive's incident-type coverage noted in TEMPLATES_INDEX.md
Middlebury's pre-release of exact alert text is an unusual transparency practice — most institutions publish only that 'a drill will occur' without disclosing wording
Triple-DRILL phrasing ('Shelter in Place DRILL' + 'THIS IS A DRILL' bookend) reflects post-2010s best practice for distinguishing exercise from real-world alerts
Marks Middlebury's first-ever campus-wide shelter-in-place drill — followed by quarterly drills throughout 2025, suggesting an institutional commitment to regular practice
Notable for a NESCAC institution — peers like Williams, Bowdoin, and Amherst did not maintain equivalent visible drill programs as of late 2024
Outcome
Drill completed at 2:05 PM EST without incident. No live simulations (such as active shooter scenarios) were included. The exercise established the template Middlebury would repeat in May 2025, July 2025, and September 2025 drills.
Provenance

Sources

  1. Official
    Shelter-in-Place Drill Set for December 6 — Middlebury College Midd Stories
    middlebury.edu
  2. Student Paper
    College to conduct first shelter-in-place drill this week — The Middlebury Campus
    middleburycampus.com
  3. Official
    November 21, 2024 Update — Middlebury Staff Council
    middlebury.edu
  4. Official
    Emergency Notification Systems (ENS) — Middlebury College Emergency Response
    middlebury.edu
Tags
drilltestsystem-testprivate-liberal-artsnescacvermontfirst-evermidd-alertshelter-in-place-drilldocumentation-template
Added May 2026Updated May 2026Via ingestion