Cancelled classes cost serious time and money for some of SF State’s most traveled commuters, insulting dedicated globetrotters with a taped-up notice amid the rising cost of fees, tuition and transportation. With the integration of current campus technology, SF State could finally let go of old technology and adopt a much more effective notification strategy—the text message.

One third of students surveyed spend over one hour and $8 a day commuting, according to a recent [X]press survey of 40. A handful spend as much as $20 a day, traveling from cities such as Vallejo and Santa Cruz.

“It takes up the whole day,” said student Emily Cox, who drives for over an hour on the one-way trip from Santa Rosa.

Taking a single course, Cox’s journeying is a waste if she finds that class is cancelled for the day. Some professors send an e-mail to warn students of a cancellation, but those messages are often left unread.

“You get it when you get home,” said Mikka Bonel, a student who commutes to school by MUNI.

At the five MUNI stops around the school, 6,500 people disembark on the average day, according to a study by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. When added to the 2,300 daily parking permits sold by the Department of Transportation, at least 8,700 people commute to campus in every day.

The text message, unlike email, can reach students mid-commute. However, providing instructors with an easy way to send text messages to their students through the professor-specific version of the “mySFSU” system may require more politics than programming.

SF State is in the “test phase” of a system that includes text messaging in its approach to sending important alerts to students, according to Gail Orr-Smith, emergency coordinator at the University Police Department. During an emergency, campus officials could access a database and send a simultaneous notice to every student’s email, home phone and a text-compatible cell phone.

In theory, the same technology used to send a text message in an emergency could be integrated with the program instructors use to examine their class roster, according to Phoebe Kwan, executive director of SF State’s in-house programming team, the Department of Information Technology.

“It’s a matter of resources,” Kwan said, “Most things are technically possible—it’s just the money and resources needed to do it.”

Due to the importance of messages sent through the university’s emergency notification system, however, Orr-Smith insisted that the text-message function will never be used for another purpose.

“We want you to know that we’re not playing games,” she said. “This is real.”

“It would have to be a whole reassessment,” Kwan said, adding that the system her department helped design gathered student contact information exclusively to be used in an emergency.

All of the students questioned in the survey said they would volunteer their information to receive texts when a class is cancelled. According to Kwan, a system that would allow professors to text their students could still keep their cell phone number private.

For Rik Lopes, who spends $18 a day for parking and bridge toll and $100 a month on gas in his commute from Oakland, knowing when a class was cancelled would be appreciated.

“That would save my life,” he said.

“For What it’s Worth” is a regular opinion column in the Business and Technology section. The opinions expressed are those of the columnist and not those of [X]press.