Building a Safer School Community with Innovative Mass Notification Resources
By Stephanie Osorno, Marketing Copywriter at Alertus Technologies
After a strange and unexpected shift to virtual learning, many school districts, colleges, and universities are finally beginning to put a plan in place for their students to safely return to their educational facilities this fall.
Of course, these plans will come with many changes and updates to previous school protocols. In addition to implementing social distance guidelines and more extensive sanitary procedures, school boards are now opting to cut down on campus police presence and School Resource Officer (SRO) programs in light of recent police brutality events.
This raises a big question for school communities: What are some alternative ways to ensure safe spaces at your facility with the potential loss of these traditional police force resources? In this blog, we explore some of the ways that implementing a comprehensive Mass Notification System (MNS) can help fill a wide range of school safety gaps.
Timely Notification
True, single-point of activation is crucial for rapidly communicating timely information—from school shooting incidents to severe weather events—to your entire school community, or to specific departments within the school.
All emergency notification endpoints should be easily activated by just a click of a button to reduce emergency response times. Keep in mind that the easier your MNS activation is, the faster you can send out critical alerts and keep everyone safe.
Mobile Activation
Mobile activation is ideal for activating an alert and reaching your school community via push notifications within a matter of seconds.
The Alertus Mobile Suite, for example, was built for enhanced mobile notification between safety personnel and end users. It includes the Alertus Activator App and the Alertus Recipient App:
With the Alertus Activator App, authorized safety personnel can quickly activate and send emergency notification alerts to faculty, staff, and students via Android or iOS tablets or smartphones. These alerts can be pre-planned ahead of time using preset emergency templates and edited on the fly to fit the specific emergency.
The Alertus Recipient App, on the other hand, allows end users to not only receive push notifications, but also to quickly send geo-tagged incident reports to safety personnel via the incident reporting feature if needed.
This is a great way to empower designated safety committee members, or other qualified faculty personnel, to activate and respond to an alert message without having to rely solely on police officials.
The Wellington School, a K-12 school in Columbus, Ohio, knows firsthand about the positive effects that can come from enabling school faculty to be more involved with emergency preparedness efforts.
“We trained the entire faculty to use the Alertus Activator App to initiate an alert. The best thing was that we began teaching them that this mobile activator was their version of a fire alarm pull. If an emergency is happening, they now have that immediate decision making in their hands.” - John Kruzan, Director of Technology, The Wellington School
You can learn more about the various emergency notification improvements that the Wellington School achieved with an MNS here.
Integrated & Automated
With a flexible, scalable, and reliable MNS, you can streamline your emergency communication and response procedures through integration and building automation capabilities.
Communication System Integration
Be sure to seek an MNS that can integrate with your current communication system to create a seamless response for any circumstance.
This makes it easy for designated safety committee members to instantly send an alert from a single activation point to every available communication channel in your school facility:
A comprehensive MNS will also be able to offer weather feed integration for location-specific weather alerts.
The Alertus ThreatWatcher tool, for instance, allows organizations and schools to broadcast real-time weather updates and up-to-the-minute, site-specific warnings from AccuWeather Skyguard®, Severe Weather Warnings, and from the NWS to multiple endpoints of the Alertus System.
So when it comes to a severe weather event, you won't need dispatchers to be on the lookout for weather alerts from a weather radio or mobile device.
Building Automation
In addition to your current communication system, an effective MNS can use the Internet of Things (IoT) technology to integrate with building automation systems, including camera systems, fire alarm systems, door access control, and more, for a more efficient alerting process.
Camera Systems - By combining the features and capabilities of your camera systems with your MNS, you can automatically identify threats and quickly activate emergency notification.
Use Case: A smart camera system picks up footage of an armed stranger in the school parking lot. This detection can then trigger the Alertus System to send a notification to safety committee members, or designated faculty, in the area where the suspect was spotted.
Fire Alarm Systems - Integrating your fire alarm systems your MNS will help to heighten awareness and urgency during a time sensitive emergency such as a fire.
Use Case: In the event of a fire, the fire pull would activate the fire alarms, as well as trigger evacuation instructions to computer desktops, mobile devices, VoIP phones, the PA system using intelligible text-to-speech technology, and other available alerting devices.
Door Access Control - A robust MNS can even integrate with your access control and building management systems for instant situational awareness and improved incident management.
Use Case: During a lockdown for a shooting incident, the Alertus System can trigger the door control system to automatically lock all of the school’s exterior doors.
Audible & Visual Notification
When selecting the appropriate MNS for your organization, choose one that can offer both audible and visual notification options. This will help to ensure that you’ll be able to reach all individuals during an emergency, including those with auditory impairments.
Here are some examples of audible and visual notification devices:
The Alert Beacon®
In the event of an emergency, Alert Beacons were designed to capture attention from a distance with bright strobes and clear emergency tone sounders. If needed, they can also display a custom message about the emergency and how to appropriately respond.
Alert Beacons can be mounted and placed on any floor of the building.
Digital Signage and LED Marquees
LED Marquees and Digital Signage are great for instantly displaying emergency notification alerts, or other relevant non-critical communications.
These visual notification devices can be placed in large indoor areas with loud ambient noise, such as cafeterias and gymnasiums.
Horn Strobes
Alertus' Horn Strobes come with multicolored light options to deliver both audible and visual notification from a single device.
These horn strobes can be placed in an indoor or outdoor area, depending on what best suits your school community.
Cost-Effective
Integrated solutions, as well as leveraging existing devices, are essential ways to help mitigate the upfront costs of implementing a new MNS. This approach ultimately delivers a high level of return on your investment toward existing devices.
One of the many perks of implementing an MNS like the Alertus System is that there is only a one-time cost upon implementation. That means you won’t have to worry about budgeting each year to maintain school safety programs.
While an MNS is not intended to replace the security that comes with trained police force, it can help to ease the loss and enhance student safety as best as possible during this transitional period.
To learn more about how an MNS can benefit your school community this fall, contact an Alertus Representative today.