Implementing School Alert System Best Practices 

Choosing the right school alert system is daunting, from choosing your emergency notification system to deciding between a wearable panic button and an app.

And then there is the responsibility of keeping your students, teachers, staff, and community members safe in crisis situations and the small scale emergencies schools experience daily. 

Keeping students safe is the number one priority for most administrators because learning can’t happen when students are in danger. The Research Alliance for New York City Schools published a report that ties perceptions of school safety directly to academic improvement. The tie between safety and improvement was greater than safety and teacher collaboration, professional development, or high academic expectations.

Impacts of a Safe School Environment

It’s understandable why a school would implement a comprehensive school alert system when the benefits for student performance and teacher retention are clear and positive. However, maintaining a safe campus is more challenging in 2024 than before the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns.

Safety Is a Recruitment and Retention Issue

Teachers are increasingly concerned with their safety, and they’re right to be, with 14% reporting physical violence from their students. That perception of danger led nearly 50% of respondents in the same survey to report wanting to quit or switch schools—from the inevitable behavioral issues teachers deal with to fear of the unlikely active shooter scenario.

A school that makes its teachers feel safe retains more teachers, making it easier to maintain a safe school environment. Conversely, schools perceived to be unsafe have difficulty recruiting and retaining good teachers, which can lead to an exponentially worse perception of safety. 

Students Learn Better in Safe Schools

In a survey of more than 340,000 students in more than 700 middle schools, researchers found a “consistent negative relationship between feeling unsafe in the classroom and test scores.”

Student safety affects more than test scores. Students who feel unsafe in school are more susceptible to self-harming behavior, suicidal ideation, and depressive symptoms. 

Students who feel unsafe are also more likely to be absent and have low standardized test scores. Absenteeism can reduce academic achievement and safety risks for students and their peers. 

Creating a culture of safety, in which everyone is expected and empowered to protect the campus, starts with making each individual feel safe. Implementing a comprehensive, multi-layer safety strategy, including a school alert system, can help.  

What is a School Alert System?

School alert systems can be any platform that allows administrators to communicate with their campuses during an emergency. They keep everyone on campus connected, so during an emergency, anyone within the school community can be notified, safety protocols can be enacted, and the emergency response can be accelerated. 

For quite some time, systems like landline phones, intercoms, and radio communication have been used for emergency communication. In recent years, digital technology solutions have rapidly evolved, such as remote, cloud-based systems, IoT (Internet of Things), and AI-driven machine learning software. As with many other industries, this digital boom era has changed how schools approach the relationship between tech and school safety.

Schools may employ many different types of school safety technology solutions, depending on the specific vulnerabilities and risk factors on their campuses, as well as budgetary concerns and other district priorities.

These technologies include digital surveillance, alarms and sensors, weapons detection, mobile alert systems, safety software applications, digital access control, and vape detection.

Modern school alert systems often consist of mobile panic buttons—such as a smartphone app for teachers and staff—a wall-mounted panic button, or a two-way radio communication system.

For instance, after the Parkland shooting in 2018, new school safety legislation was passed, known as “Alyssa’s Law.” The law, named after shooting victim Alyssa Alhadeff, requires public elementary and secondary schools to be equipped with “silent panic alarms that are directly linked to law enforcement.”

Yet many of the tools used in school alert systems come with drawbacks and challenges that must be addressed. In a survey of more than 1,200 teachers, the majority said they experienced the following challenges to reporting an emergency before switching to CENTEGIX:

• Retrieving a phone from a desk, bag, or other location for those who don’t carry a phone on their person
• Weak cellular signal and Wi-Fi strength in the classroom/elsewhere on campus
• The time needed to power up, unlock, and access the right app in a crisis situation 
• Delayed response when calling the office
• Relying on sending a text/email 
• Having to yell for help 
• Sending a student to find help 
• Using an intercom or radio/walkie-talkie 
• Using the wall button 
• Relying on another teacher or staff member 
• Leaving the scene of an emergency to get help 

Mobile Security Apps

Some school alert systems have adopted mobile apps as digital panic buttons. The thought process behind this is that most school staff have access to a smartphone or tablet, which means these devices can readily be used to send a panic signal or communicate during an emergency.

Mobile panic button apps can create challenges in practice, and these implementations may fail as a result.

Using mobile apps means teachers and staff need access to charged and nearby devices and must be able to access the app quickly and consistently without difficulty.

• Teachers can’t always access their phones. There’s no guarantee that a teacher will have their mobile device on their person. In fact, most prefer to teach without the distraction of a phone. 
• Apps rely on outside systems. Because the app is available on many different types of phones with varying software versions, there is no guarantee that it will work or that the signal will be strong enough. The app system relies on the phone, the software installation, and the network. 
• An app’s location notification capabilities are too limited. Phone GPS can give some information about where an emergency alert originates but can’t tell you exactly which room to respond to. 
• Apps have a poor adoption rate among teachers. In one Florida county, an app in use was only downloaded by 16% of school staff in the first two months.

Fixed Wall-Mounted Panic Buttons

When a student suffers a medical emergency or behavioral health crisis outside the classroom or away from a fixed panic button, the teacher has to leave the situation to request help. Similarly, responders won’t know the precise location of the emergency, just which button was triggered. And when an incident happens outside, there may not be an available button at all. 

Two-Way Radio Systems

Two-way radios allow school staff to communicate quickly and are often a key component of a broader school alert system. But they still offer challenges. For one, a two-way radio is bulky and indiscreet. It is difficult to request help on a radio without escalating a situation. 

If Your State Doesn’t Mandate a School Emergency Alert System, They May Soon

A version of Alyssa’s Law has been introduced in the state legislature or enacted into law in 13 states and at the federal level, and many are going through the legislative process. The law was created in response to the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting and named in honor of Alyssa Alhadeff, one of the victims that day.

Alyssa’s Law requires schools to install silent panic alarms directly linked to law enforcement agencies to reduce response times during life-threatening school emergencies. The silent alarms allow teachers and staff to discreetly request help without further escalating a crisis situation.

Many states have created funding programs to help schools upgrade their safety technology and achieve compliance as a result of these laws’ passage. 

Best Practices for Implementing a School Alert System

Every school has different safety and security needs. Still, when it’s time to choose a school emergency alert system, almost all schools should seek a solution that can achieve the following:

Communicate Directly With Emergency Responders

This is a legal requirement in states with Alyssa’s Law on the books. However, for all safety planning situations, direct communication with law enforcement and emergency responders is critical to reducing response times. 

Include a Wearable Panic Button

A wearable panic button increases teacher adoption rates while ensuring that the alarm tool is available at all times since emergencies can happen when least expected. With wearable wireless panic button systems, teachers don’t have to use their personal device as part of the school safety protocol raising concerns about privacy and being tracked. 

Integrate Seamlessly with Other Technologies

Most schools already have closed-circuit or internet-of-things camera systems, security alarm systems, and attendance management software. If your safety platform doesn’t work with your other safety-related systems, you’ll have to duplicate labor manually, transferring information back and forth. That manual step introduces the opportunity for human error. 

Provide Room-Level Accuracy and Visibility

Even the smallest school campuses have complexity, often with dozens of rooms, multiple buildings, and vast outdoor space. Without room-level visibility, you can’t know where an emergency is happening or where to provide a response. 

Cover the Entire Campus, External Buildings, and Outdoor Areas

Analysis of staff and campus-wide alerts of CrisisAlert users shows that only 54% of safety incidents happen in the classroom.

Your school alert system must protect students in the main building as well as in the parking lot, at the football stadium, in mobile outbuildings, and all the spaces in between. 

Be Simple to Learn, Use, and Maintain

Complicated systems don’t get adopted, and a simple system is the best way to accelerate emergency response during a crisis.

How the CENTEGIX Safety Platform™ Keeps Schools Safe

The Safety Platform is the foundational layer of a multi-layered school alert system. Each layer of the CENTEGIX process focuses on a different aspect of safety, all combining to offer comprehensive protection and accelerate emergency responses when time matters most. 

• Personal safety
• Visitor safety and liability
• Campus and facility monitoring 
• Crisis reunification

CrisisAlert™

CrisisAlert™ empowers teachers to protect themselves and their students anytime, anywhere on campus. 

The CrisisAlert wearable panic button allows teachers to quickly trigger an emergency alert, from a request for help to a campus-wide lockdown, from the push of a button. It allows the wearer to contact administrators and safety staff for help or notify local emergency responders and trigger a campus-wide lockdown.

The badge doesn’t rely on a cellular, Wi-Fi, or Bluetooth connection so teachers can use it anywhere on campus with pinpoint location accuracy. 

Safety Blueprint™

Safety Blueprint is a dynamic mapping solution that gives your team total campus visibility while creating your safety plan and while responding to a real-time crisis. 

Safety Blueprint creates a to-scale, interactive map of your campus, displays the exact locations of safety assets (like AEDs and fire extinguishers), maps evacuation routes, and marks utility access points. 

With layered mapping, you can control the visibility of specific views of your facilities, IT systems, safety assets, and emergency planning.

The system also works with CrisisAlert to give you real-time, room-level visibility into your entire campus so you know exactly when and where a CrisisAlert alarm is triggered. Once an alert is triggered, your response team and local emergency responders can see the exact position of the alert and deliver a precise and appropriate response. 

Visitor Management

Visitor Management ensures everyone who comes to your campus is cleared to be there. With CENTEGIX Visitor Management, every visitor’s government ID is scanned and compared to state and proprietary databases to prevent sex offenders and parents embroiled in custody issues from entering the school when they shouldn’t.

Because custody and legal statuses can change from one day to the next, any visitor management system must check each visitor each time they visit. Many districts perform screenings for volunteers at the beginning of the school year but don’t update those screenings throughout the year. 

Visitor Management has the added ability to record early dismissals and tardy students. This feature saves office staff time by signing students in and printing hall passes. It also helps administrators identify potential problems by flagging patterns of missed school. 

With Enhanced Visitor Management, CENTEGIX-protected schools can issue wearable badges to visitors, giving administrators and safety officers real-time visibility into visitor timelines and locations. The Enhanced Visitor Management System also allows administrators to control visitor access, preventing people from engaging in unauthorized behavior or preventing instructional interruptions from visitors “peeking in to say hello” to teachers and students. 

The tool gives your school insight into how long vendors, visitors, and volunteers spend in your school and which areas of the school receive the most traffic. With that data, you and your team can adjust policies, adjust volunteer assignments, and protect instructional time. 

Reunification

CENTEGIX’s Reunification tool helps your team restore order in a chaotic environment. The system provides options and redundancies with CENTEGIX scanners and mobile app capabilities. 

If students have been evacuated, the tool gives teachers and staff instant visibility into each evacuated student’s status and helps them reunite with the correct teacher or approved guardians. 

When a guardian picks a student up from an evacuation point, teachers can scan the guardian’s identification to compare it against the approved list, working to protect the safety of each child. 

Can the CENTEGIX Safety Platform Help You Protect Your School?

The CENTEGIX Safety Platform scanned over 3.3 million visitors, issued more than 100,000 alerts, denied entry to nearly 500 unauthorized visitors, and achieved 100% adoption during the 2022-2023 school year. 

Find out how the safety platform can protect your students, teachers, staff, and community members.