DENVER — As school districts look for ways to keep their classrooms safe for students and staff, many are turning to technology.
Denver Public Schools (DPS) has rolled out the first phase of CrisisGo to help the district improve communication during its response to emergencies. The company provides schools with advanced alerting software and other tools to streamline a school district's response to incidents.
Kip Sixbery, emergency manager for DPS, sees the benefits of staying up-to-date by implementing technology into his department.
"After every critical incident in the district, we debrief with the school. We want a view from the school's lens on how that critical incident unfolded, how it was processed, and how we handled it as a department of safety," said Sixbery.
Sixbery noted that communication was the number one issue when debriefing after a critical incident. Schools wanted better communication and access to information during an incident, not just before and after.
"If you think about the life cycle of a lockdown or a secure perimeter, it could take just a couple of minutes or it could take hours. Now, imagine being a teacher or student inside of a classroom and to have been communicated at the start of an incident, and then not again until the very end," said Sixbery.
Prior to CrisisGo, staff and students had no safe way to effectively communicate with school safety officers. In addition, the DPS dispatch center had to individually notify every surrounding school and department within a 1.5-mile radius of the incident.
Anyone with access to CrisisGo can immediately send an alert to all school community members with the push of a button, speeding up the response time. A loud notification will play on mobile devices before going silent after 20 seconds.
"Once the incident starts, there is a great deal of commotion in the building. We have P.A. announcements going off. We have the CrisisGo app [that] actually makes us give significant noise at the onset of an incident. But after that, we mute everything. Everything is silent," said Sixbery.
When an alert is received, each member of CrisisGo can use the app or click a link to start messaging with school safety officers, students, staff, and parents.
In an emergency, Sixbery said this method will help first responders focus on resource allocation and give some relief to people involved in the incident.
"For these incidents within the district, being able to gather information from as many sources as possible is critical for the efficiency and how we operate through that incident," said Sixbery. "With that two-way communication feature, people involved in the incident, people locked down the building, can give us first-hand knowledge of what's going on in that building. And that makes it easier for us to allocate resources to a certain part of the building."
In the first phase of this roll-out, only school staff will have access to the CrisisGo app. DPS plans to add students and parents in the future.
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