At Unity College, everything will be examined, said an administrator, from how students are alerted of threats to the policy of allowing students to keep guns in a secure area on campus.
Sheri Stevens, vice president for administration at the University of Maine at Augusta, said administrators have been going over that school's security and crisis plan since news broke of the shootings Monday.
"One of the ideas that we are exploring is how we can get mass communication out ... how could we get a message out to people that there is an event, that there is a security threat," she said.
Technology that can send mass text messages to cell phones is one possibility that the UMA is considering, said Stevens. UMF is also looking into that option.
The belated warning students received hours after the first killings at the huge university in Blacksburg, Va., has been cited by some as factor in the tragedy.
Jennifer Eriksen, director of public relations at UMF, said depending on the type of emergency, her university might use several different means of communication, including the use of text messages.
"We are certainly learning from this experience," said Eriksen, adding that university officials were looking into the use of mass text messages before this week.
The tragedy at Virginia Tech has prompted university administrators to meet several times about security issues beginning Monday, the day of the massacre. "We will be monitoring the situation at Virginia Tech and trying to learn how we can make improvements or adjustments to our own crisis plan," said Eriksen.
John Zavodny, academic chairman at Unity College, said his college's crisis response plan is two years old and due for an update under the college's normal cycle.The events earlier this week will add some urgency and energy to that task, he said.
Tiny in comparison to Virginia Tech -- Unity College has about 550 students while the southern university has more than 25,000 -- Zavodny said his school still needs a coordinated response to emergencies.
The challenge for preparing for such a crisis is that there is no way of predicting the problems responders will face, he said.
"The situation is not going to be entirely like anything else you or anybody else has faced in the past," he said.
As part of its response, Zavodny said the college is considering putting locks on classroom doors, and mulling the role cell phones or pagers could have in warning students.
The college is also taking a look at its policy of allowing students to keep hunting rifles in a secure place in the public safety area.
"We are going to look at it from all angles. That doesn't mean that we necessarily see a problem with our policy," he added.
The smallness of most Maine schools would work in their favor when it comes to preventing similar tragedies, administrators say.
Cho Seung-Hui, the gunman in the rampage, reportedly had a history of mental illness and expressed anger and violence in writing and on video. Those sorts of red flags are less likely to go unnoticed in a small college like Colby, in Waterville, said Stephen Heacock, communications director and associate vice president at Colby.
Colby is a very "high touch" environment where student issues are more likely to be noticed than in large universities, said Heacock.
After a student was abducted from a parking lot and murdered over three years ago, Colby upgraded security, enlisting a global risk management company from New York to suggest changes.
Campus security can remotely lock down buildings, and Heacock said that if an armed person is on campus, police are called immediately and can be there in five minutes.
John Delile, dean of finance and administration at Kennebec Valley Community College, said his institution also has a new emergency response plan.
Still, he said, while that plan, like the plans of other schools, may use every means to mitigate and try to prevent tragedies, it is not clear they can ever do enough.
Stevens, of UMA, agreed.
As frightening as the killings were, Stevens said, what is just as scary to administrators is that it simply is not clear that even the best planning could prevent such random crimes. "You hope and pray you are just never confronted with it," said Stevens.