Situational Awareness in the School Systems

On March 11, 2015

We’ve already detailed how our situational awareness system can be utilized in the hospital or a long-term care setting. Applying those same technologies to the school system is just as valuable and creates an environment that takes proactive measures to ensure safety of all students and faculty. It can also be integrated to help daily operations be more efficient by being an effective tool for communication.

Emergency Threats and Situations

It’s not easy to come to terms with the fact that your child may not be completely safe in their school. But the reality of the world we live in today forces us to face that truth. Even schools must go beyond their outdated emergency protocols for one that implements responsive technology that makes students and staff safer from potential threats.

Our automated alerting engine is placed strategically in areas where students gather in groups, such as lunchrooms, classrooms, playgrounds, and other common areas. The system is built to react based on pre-customized breaches like unwarranted door access or the breaking of a window. Any of these types of breaches send out automatic alerts to administrators and emergency personnel, while a prerecorded message can stream over the PA system informing everyone to stay inside the classroom or give instructions on where they are to go depending on the threat.

Teachers and faculty members can also wear pendants used to alert the system of some kind of emergency wherein the proper authority is notified. That can be useful in cases where a threat is immediately present in the classroom without any of the other systems being breached.

More Functions of Situational Awareness Systems in Schools

Being able to react against emergency threats is certainly a big part of why we’ve selected the situational awareness system to implement as a solution for our education clients, but it is also beneficial in more practical ways. Students with special needs can wear the pendant or other device depending on their disability, which can alert the proper staff in instances of duress or other unforeseen problems. There may be a small fire in one area of the school that doesn’t necessarily pose an immediate threat to all staff and students, but having the situational awareness system present would ensure an automated reactionary alert was in place to contact the right people and still keep students and staff safe.

Situational awareness systems can even be set up to send out mass e-mails to parents in cases where the weather is really bad. Moreover, it can go as far as being used to send out reminders about upcoming school events. It’s really up to the administrators, as well as the professionals at Unity Connected Solutions to decide in what capacities to implement the system.

What is clear, however, is that today’s culture requires solutions to keep our children safe while they are at school. That means utilizing current technology with some training to be prepared for any situation, big or small. Unity Connected Solutions have developed those technologies and now need you to take the step of implementing these systems.