The frightening text message popped up: "Active shooter at Skyline. Take safe cover immediately. Classes closed for the rest of the day."

Some students and faculty at Skyline College in San Bruno received the text about the shooting on campus Sept. 2 almost immediately, but others got the warning belatedly.

"Some of the messages were delayed beyond what was acceptable for an emergency situation," said Eric Raznick, director of information technology services for the San Mateo County Community College District. "Some people got it various different times."

The Skyline shooting and the pipe-bomb attack at Hillsdale High School in San Mateo the week before have local education leaders, students and others rethinking campus safety measures.

Although the response to the two events went more or less according to plan, school leaders said, they are eyeing improvements to make students and campus employees feel safer.

"We are addressing an extensive array of elements of our emergency response to this instance and our emergency response plan overall," Skyline President Victoria Morrow said in the campus newsletter Friday. "This unwelcome event has been an extremely illuminating live test of our procedures and has allowed us to identify numerous ways to strengthen it."

Potential safety enhancements at Skyline also could be applied at College of San Mateo and Cañada College in Redwood City, district spokeswoman Barbara Christensen

Overall, district leaders said, the response to the Skyline shooting was good and included multiple means of contacting some 10,000 students about the trouble on campus — texting, the public-address system and e-mail.

But the district is seeking to boost the communication lines during such a crisis, they said.

Even before the gunfire at Skyline, Raznick said, the district was in the process of upgrading the text-messaging system at its three community colleges so that all students and employees would get emergency warnings quickly and at the same time.

The shooting in which a Skyline student was wounded will only speed up that work, he said.

"We expect it will happen in the next 30 days," he said.

Authorities charged Germaine Benjamin, 18, with possession of a firearm on a college campus in connection with the shooting.

The violence escalated from an argument between two groups of men in a campus parking lot, police said.

Skyline also will study whether to expand the reach of the campus public-address system after some students complained of not hearing the announcement about the shooting, district leaders said.

Currently, Skyline is putting the system in new or remodeled buildings, Christensen said. Installing it before a new or remodeled building goes up would be expensive, however.

Skyline plans to address other concerns raised in the shooting's aftermath, such as an apparent delay in locking down the school, the appearance of racial profiling of some students and staff, and transportation challenges for those whose vehicles were sequestered within the crime scene, Morrow said.

San Bruno police Chief Neil Telford said he is pleased with his officers' response at Skyline but the department will take some lessons away from the incident.

"We could have improved our communication with the faculty initially," Telford said.

Knowing with whom to talk and how to reach them immediately is critical in such an emergency, he said.

For instance, it would have been valuable to know who was in charge of the various campus buildings, he said. That information would have helped with the evacuation of the more than 2,000 students and staff on campus at the time.

Nonetheless, his officers managed to get everyone out safely and quickly set up a perimeter around the campus, Telford said.

His department also will look into doing lockdown drills, which make a response to this type of incident more fluid, he said.

"You can never have too much training," he said, adding that an internal review and debriefing should be completed in a few days.

In the coming weeks, Skyline will see additional police patrols. Telford insisted it's a safe place but said the extra police presence will offer students and staff a sense of comfort.

Skyline student Alfredo Rivera still feels safe on campus, he said.

"Things like that (shooting), you can't prevent," said Rivera, 19. "It's just something that happened on campus. It was between two groups of people" in contrast to a planned campus attack such as the massacres at Columbine High School in 1999 and Virginia Tech University in 2007.

San Mateo Union High School District leaders say they believe the response to the two pipe-bomb explosions at Hillsdale also was handled well. It included a lockdown and Hillsdale students being evacuated to a nearby middle school, where their parents picked them up.

Still, San Mateo Union leaders note areas where improvements can be made.

Although parents commended Hillsdale for a relatively smooth evacuation, the school administration is studying ways to release students to their families "more efficiently" in a future crisis, said San Mateo Union board Vice President Linda Lees Dwyer.

Lees Dwyer also has recommended that San Mateo Union form a task force "to look at our safety measures and what can be improved upon," she said.

One idea is to have students in all San Mateo Union schools wear identification badges, she said.

"You can immediately see whether a child on campus is a student," she said.

Two years ago, Carlmont High in Belmont started requiring its students to wear badges as part of a campaign to boost safety and security there.

Authorities arrested Alex Youshock, 17, for the Aug. 24 Hillsdale explosions, which didn't result in any injuries.

The teen — who attended Hillsdale for about a year as an underclassman — planned the attack for months as revenge against a school that he felt wronged him, authorities said.

At least one other local district is revisiting its safety procedures in light of the Skyline and Hillsdale episodes.

"Clearly after the Hillsdale issue, we talked about (campus security) right off the bat," said Michael Crilly, superintendent for the Jefferson Union High School District. "We actually moved up our safety drills related to school violence."

At the time of the Skyline shooting, Jefferson Union's Oceana High in Pacifica had finished classes for the day but had about 50 students on campus for after-school activities, Principal Caro Pemberton said.

Because of the proximity of Skyline, Pemberton said, Oceana decided to gather those students and lock down the school. The students were picked up by their parents.

"We didn't feel we were necessarily in imminent danger," she said, "but in the wake of the incident at Hillsdale, there's heightened awareness and a need to be cautious."