By Heather Terry
Across the entire school safety spectrum, technology has played a significant role in enhancing school safety, especially in recent years. Coordinating this technology successfully requires looking at the big picture of your school safety and security ecosystem. Getting your existing systems to communicate with each other can better streamline your school safety initiatives—and budget.
Let’s look at school safety and security technology through the lens of Prevent, Prepare, Respond, and Recover.
Prevent
Student Wellbeing and Mental Health
Early intervention is the most important and effective way to support a student who may be experiencing challenges they are not equipped to manage. Being able to recognize a student in the initial stages of distress empowers schools to reduce that child’s exposure and give them the support they need to cope and heal.
Prepare
Surveillance and Physical Security Systems
High-tech surveillance systems, such as security cameras, can monitor activity within the school and provide a valuable resource for law enforcement in the event of an emergency.
When partnered with an AI system, these systems can provide sub-second detection of potential active shooter gun threats.
Further, safety features such as remote-locking doors and even smartboards can be integrated, improving your school’s ability to respond quickly and communicate readily in the event of an emergency.
Drills should test your school’s existing procedures and policies—and use the same technology you’ll use in a real emergency. This enables your school community to create muscle memories that increase response efficiency. It also means you can analyze your procedures and technology for weaknesses to see where you need to improve performance.
Respond
Emergency Response Systems
Emergency response systems can quickly alert authorities to an emergency, allowing for a rapid response.
Further, app-based solutions—unlike hardware such as panic badges, which require a proprietary mesh network—connects from any hardwired, cellular, or wireless network empowering staff to initiate a response to any type of emergency, talk directly to 911 operators, and provide critical details.
Because the alert uses mobile app technology, it allows for two-way chat communication during an emergency, giving staff and emergency responders real-time updates for additional context and details to help keep students safe.
Recover
Accountability
You can connect your emergency management system to your student information system, enabling you to quickly and easily account for students and staff, providing emergency responders with critical information. And, administrators and emergency responders can also be updated with the location of visitors in the event of an emergency, such as a lockdown, fire, or earthquake.
Reunification
Minimizing trauma is directly correlated to a safe, efficient reunification, so having a system that integrates with your student information system is critical to reducing chaos and allowing you to confidently release students to approved guardians.
Heather Terry is the content marketing manager for Raptor Technologies, www.raptortech.com. Founded in 2002, Raptor has partnered with 52,000+ schools globally to provide integrated visitor, volunteer, emergency management, safeguarding, and early intervention software and services that cover the full spectrum of school and student safety.
