Enabling Students To Learn Safely
Facilitating robust, reliable communications between school staff and first responders
- By William Sako
- April 14, 2020
The primary concern of every K-12 school is to enable
students to learn, grow and thrive in a safe and secure
environment. In trying to accomplish that goal, schools
are facing a big obstacle in facilitating robust, reliable
and immediate communications between school staff
and first responders during an emergency event. Schools continue to
search for integrated and universal solutions to meet their communications
challenges.
Most K-12 schools, however, will admit that their actual communication
capabilities are composed of disparate systems and equipment,
which are not interconnected or integrated. As a result, their
communications capabilities are lacking and in some cases completely
inadequate, which can put their students and teachers in harm’s
way and reduce the efficiency of their emergency response.
Leveraging Emergency Communication
K-12 schools regularly face emergencies that require instant and
coordinated responses from multiple teams to manage an emergency
event. It is important to recognize that during an emergency, every
administrator, teacher and staff member in a school becomes a first
responder. Together, they can provide a coordinated response using
various communication tools like smartphones, two-way radios, laptop
computers and iPad tablets. The key to making their emergency
response more effective and immediate is ensuring that they can
communicate instantly, regardless of the device they are using, the
network they can connect to or their physical location.
It is also critical that information from alarm systems, video surveillance
systems and mass notification systems becomes available to
the K-12 school staff and all responding fire fighters, law enforcement
and emergency medical staff.
In addition, school administrators must fulfill their responsibility
of notifying the parents of students – whom they are entrusted to
keep safe – about an emergency event. There can be major political
and legal consequences if a K-12 school lacks the ability to communicate
effectively with parents during emergency events such as
severe weather, chemical spill, utility outage, school security lockdown
and or any other type of disruptive event.
Generally, schools will rely on a campus-wide mass notification
system to provide a reliable method to notify people on campus and
parents of an emergency event and explain what is happening, what
to do, where to go and when it’s safe to resume normal activities.
Establishing Two-Way Communication
The truth is that an effective emergency communication system is not leveraging many, if not all, of the monitoring,
communications and control systems in
your school building or on your campus.
A K-12 school should equip its critical
emergency management team with two-way
radios. Two-way radios are specifically purpose-
built for two-way communications on a
private radio network. This will provide the
most reliable means of communicating during
an emergency event. Many schools try to
use smartphones for emergency communications
but this approach is challenging and
can be ineffective.
The reason is that during an emergency
event, the cellular services can become overtaxed
and swamped with calling, which can
make their services unreliable. When dealing
with a school emergency, the last thing the
superintendent, principal, administrators or
teachers should be thinking about is the
functionality, performance and reliability of
their emergency communication system.
The reality is that in an emergency, the
most reliable form of communications is a
two-way radio system. In addition, current
two-way radio system technology allows the
radio system to interface and communicate
with virtually any other type of communications
device such as smartphones, GPS units,
laptop computers and iPad tablets. They can
also interface and communicate with telephone
landlines and on any public or private
mobile data network, including Wi-Fi. When
local fire, police and emergency first
responders arrive on a school campus, they
usually immediately establish an incident
command center with communications
being a key component.
The fire, police and emergency responders
will bring their own two-way radio system and
handheld radios, which will operate on different
frequencies than the school radios. However,
these mobile command centers are normally
equipped with interface bridging
equipment, which allow them to patch the
school radios into their system so they can talk
with school’s emergency management team.
As a best practice, a school should also
leverage the resources that it already has in
place to communicate with employees on
their own personal devices. This allows the
principal or administrator who is attending
a convention or at a meeting away from the
school to use their smartphones to communicate
seamlessly with radio users back at
the school.
Developing A School Safety Plan
The school safety plan is the single most
important part of the emergency management
process. You should begin by identifying
the threats to your campus; create worstcase
scenarios; evaluate your systems; and
identify the hardware and software issues
you need to address.
Next, the school safety plan should identify
your emergency management response team
and assign responsibilities. They need to
determine what emergency communication
systems and protocols should be used; what
messages should be sent in specific situations;
where you will instruct people to go; by what
routes; and to which safe areas. It should
detail evacuation plans and provide signage to
guide your school occupants to safety.
School safety plans should address planning
and preparation, mitigation of vulnerabilities,
response to events that happen and recovery
after an event has happened. They must be an
ongoing process, regularly reviewed and
revised with all partners, from public safety
agencies to communication vendors.
The school safety plan further explains
how your emergency management team will
be trained and prescribes methods for implementing
training activities with different
simulated emergency scenarios. It also
focuses on the cooperation and synergy
required from local government, fire fighters,
law enforcement, emergency medical
and disaster recovery staff and provides a
methodology for accomplishing a total
response to any type of crisis.
Over time, things change and so must
your emergency communications process. A
K-12 school campus is a growing, evolving
community, from a structural, operational
and human standpoint.
This is why it is necessary to conduct regular
tests, evaluations, exercises and drills of
not only your emergency management process,
but also your emergency communications
systems, procedures and response
actions. People do what they practice, so a
routine schedule will help to prepare your
people.
This article originally appeared in the March April 2020 issue of Campus Security Today.