Feeling Safe
Leveraging technology in the education sector to create safer, healthier learning environments
- By Christopher Buecksler, Derek Peterson
- June 17, 2020
The best environment for learning is one where students,
teachers and staff feel safe. With increasing incidents nationally
of vaping and bullying, plus the ever-present threat of an
active shooter situation, school administrators and their
respective security teams face far greater challenges to provide
safety levels enjoyed by previous generations than their predecessors
could ever have imagined.
Safety and Health Issues
Fortunately, new technologies are available to allow administrators to
manage the safety and health issues in schools. These tools also allow
them to make better and smarter decisions by leveraging data that
they collect to understand where incidents of concern, such as vaping,
smoking, bullying, graffiti and other inappropriate behaviors are taking
place, and how frequently.
It’s up to administrators and their security teams to develop, implement
and practice plans that mesh seamlessly with technology. Technology
is part of the solution for managing emergency events and
preventing, reducing and managing problematic activities and behaviors
such as vaping, bullying, fighting and vandalism.
One of the important keys to this is the consolidation of information
into one easy to use platform that can be used to generate school-wide
emergency alerts, respond to and track internal incidents and
then generate reports following those events. Having immediate
access to these powerful tools at all times is crucial – especially in a
quickly escalating crisis situation where there are any number of
moving parts and one person out of the loop or receiving inaccurate
information can lead to fatalities. Police, fire, emergency personnel as
well as school staffers, teachers, students and parents need to receive
accurate information simultaneously, in a timely fashion, throughout
each stage of the crisis or emergency situation.
Powerful Technology
Implementing powerful, yet easy-to-use technology leads to greater
efficiencies because there is a shorter learning curve and training is
easy. Having a unified and automated alert mechanism is key when it
comes to coordinating fire, police and emergency rescue efforts. When
these automated responses are included in technology that staffers are
already using, the effectiveness of the transition is enhanced.
The Long Branch (New Jersey) Public Schools, for instance, has 11
sites in its district, which presented a challenge for communicating with
each site simultaneously. Communications plans incorporated the use
of cell phones, two-way radios, emails and a special emergency channel
on its radios. While thorough, this comingling of communication
devices is counter-productive in that it greatly enhances the chances of
information not being distributed accurately and simultaneously or,
worse, not being disseminated to all relevant parties or first responders.
Seconds matter and having the ability to use technology to communicate
with first responders is critical. The alert or 911 call is part of
this, followed by the sharing of important information, including
access to cameras, door locks, floor plans, maps and other information.
First responders knowing where a fire is in a building, where an
intruder might be in an active shooter situation, or even where students
are hiding can make a significant, positive difference in how
response strategies are implemented and actions taken. Technology
that shares information during emergencies is a time saver and
potentially saves lives.
By leveraging a consolidated platform, Long Branch has a communication
system in place that empowers every staff member with
the ability to send an emergency alert to first responders, uses a mass communication
system to stay connected with all their school buildings
and offers multiple interface options. It even provides a desktop
safety app for staff members without smartphones.
Emergency Information
The Linn-Mar (Iowa) Community School District’s emergency information
and communication plans were even more analog. The school
district had relied on physical binders, but few staff members knew
what was in them or where they were. In addition, it took too much
time to update and share their revised plans when changes needed to
be made. Exasperating matters is the realization few visuals are more
likely to inspire panic than a leader in a crisis resorting to flipping
through a binder to decide what to do next.
One Linn-Mar evacuation event was successful but left the district
scrambling with what to do next after everyone had safely exited the
building. Leisa Breitfelder, Linn-Mar Community School District’s Executive
Director of Student Services, saw a need from the feedback officials
received from the drills and incidents so they could adapt their safety
procedures. Breitfelder stated, “You are always making edits to your [safety]
plan because you want to make them better and the only way you can
do that is through practicing or, unfortunately, living an incident.”
Being able to quickly make changes online and instantly update
the emergency plans for all Linn-Mar staffers enabled the district to
use the platform just days after it was implemented. Subsequently,
when local police put the district on lockdown due to a vague active
shooter threat posted on social media, Breitfelder said their school
was able to lockdown in a matter of seconds, whereas other schools
that weren’t trained with the platform took 15-20 minutes. According
to Breitfelder, from that experience, the district learned the importance
of having each school learn and train with the platform.
This is just one example of why schools need an incident management
platform that coordinates alerts, messages and notifications
through communication and Internet of Things (IoT) devices across
and with first responders, school safety and security teams, teachers
and staff and the entire education community. Since the best way to
deal with a challenging situation is to prevent it from happening, schools must also investigate the implementation
of an app that brings together alerts from
environmental sensors in bathrooms and
other locations where cameras are not permitted
that detect vaping and sound anomalies
that may indicate bullying or fighting.
Dissemination of Information
The value of adopting vaping and bullying
detection and alert systems is greatly
enhanced when partnered with consolidated
emergency communications technology for
schools, municipalities and law enforcement.
The pairing creates a security platform that
coordinates the dissemination of information
to parties responding to a crisis situation or
other events that require immediate attention.
These systems also track training efforts and
manage data, allowing for reports to be generated.
Reports and data can both be used to
create and/or adapt policies, especially in
regard to vaping and bullying prevention.
Combining these technologies allows
school administrators to quickly receive,
respond, manage and track these events and
then act accordingly. Schools need to understand
their data – such as how many times a
sensor detects students are being bullied or
are vaping. With data, analytics can be developed
to track incidents and identify patterns.
With this information, specific trouble spots
can be identified and direct action taken to
reduce vaping, bullying and other undesirable
student behaviors.
School administrators must leverage technology
to manage threats and address other
complex and changing challenges in order to
make sure schools are safe and healthy environments
for learning. For administrators,
this means making preparations, developing
response procedures and creating management
strategies to make prevention efforts
more effective. Consolidating the response
and management of security-related activities
with one app and one centralized system
is more effective, more efficient and will
reduce response time for all events, including
emergencies, which is critical, especially
during a rare active shooter situation.
Administrators must also leverage the power
of data and analyze it to dictate what steps and
policies need to be implemented to mitigate the
chances of a repeat incident. It is imperative
that they analyze the immediate aftermath of
an on-campus incident to determine the true
value of emergency-reaction strategies.
While few will argue with the need for
emergency preparedness, coordinating the
practices and drills necessary can be a daunting
challenge when you factor in laws and
regulations as well as the myriad schedules
and commitments among multiple parties
who must participate. The emergency platform
used by a school district has to make
sure everybody is able to respond in a way
that they are prescribed to and allow them to
help practice. The district can use the technology
to be able to run those drills and then
collect the appropriate data.
Let’s say a district has 15 schools. The ability
to analyze which schools have higher
numbers of bullying reports empowers officials
to put different processes or programs
in place to reduce the number of incidents,
improving the culture and climate of those
schools by doing so. Collection of data and
turning that into actionable items are critical
components of what technology can achieve.
The ability to support the drills, the simulations
and practices that these schools and
staff members need to go through are the
two most important technological elements
in a school safety plan.
The challenges faced by today’s school
administrators who are responsible for safety
dwarf those faced by their predecessors. On
the positive side, technology has never been
more powerful. As recently as the turn of the
century, the most technology a school district
administrator had at his or her disposal was a
thermostat, smoke detector and fire alarm. In
2020, school district administrators and security
personnel now have the means to coordinate
multiple first responders immediately
and simultaneously. After an incident is over,
they can generate reports and analyze data
that can be used to implement enhanced measures
and policies designed to reduce the possibility
of recurrences as well as ensure the
safety and security of staffers, students, teachers
and parents.
This article originally appeared in the May June 2020 issue of Campus Security Today.