During Georgia School Shooting, Newly-Installed Tech Spread Warnings and Called Police

A schoolteacher using an interactive whiteboard is surprised by an alert. Their school is in 'hard lockdown.' They knew — instantly — something was about to happen, and 'got everybody into a corner,' they later told CNN. Classroom doors at the school are always locked, so they then 'turned off the lights. And just kind of held everyone nice and tight, and just said, 'Wait for everything to happen, everything to pass.''



The school was Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia, where on Wednesday 11 students were shot and two killed. Two schoolteachers were also killed. But according to CNN, social studies teacher Stephen Kreyenbuhl 'said the school's new alert system bought him critical time to prepare and protect his students before a shooter opened fire just down the hall...'

The CrisisAlert system, designed by Centegix, includes a device the size of an ID badge. It's equipped with a button that, when pressed rapidly, can quietly notify administrators and local law enforcement to the exact location of an active emergency. The company works with school districts and law enforcement agencies to integrate the system into their current safety procedures and automate as much as possible. Barrow County Sheriff Jud Smith told CNN Apalachee High School had the system for less than a week and had tested it for the first time only the day before the shooting... Brent Cobb, the company's CEO, told CNN in an interview earlier this year that their CrisisAlert technology was designed following the 2018 Parkland high school shooting in Florida to give teachers and administrators a fast and discreet way to call for help.... '[Y]ou need everyone to know immediately' that a crisis is taking place.

Once a lockdown is activated, the CrisisAlert system is designed to trigger a series of responses: Pre-recorded warnings sound over the intercom system to alert the entire campus to the lockdown, while on-site safety administrators, like school resource officers [a law-enforcement officer with arrest powers, usually armed], are notified of the location of the incident. Cobb told CNN in some school districts the system is also integrated with local law enforcement agencies and can automatically call 911 and send messages to officers of the exact location of the incident. This is what happened in Barrow County. The goal, he said, is to help decrease police response times, an issue that has come under scrutiny in recent years following the shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, where it took officers 77 minutes to adequately respond to a shooter.
In an exclusive interview with CNN Thursday, Smith scrolled through the series of alerts and the detailed map his officers received to guide them to where the shooting was happening... [Social studies teacher] Kreyenbuhl said he is grateful the district implemented a system that enabled him to protect his students. 'I actually saw the lockdown initiate before I even heard the gunshots, so I had time to prepare,' he said.... 'It's insane the technology we have access to.'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.