Plum School District adopts new alert system to reduce emergency response time

When Plum School District students return to classes this fall, teachers and staff will be equipped with a new alert system intended to reduce response time in an emergency.

Plum will be the first district in Pennsylvania to use the Centegix CrisisAlert system, Assistant Superintendent Ashley Boyers said. It will be in use in all of the district’s schools and its transportation department.

“Keeping our schools safe is our primary goal,” said Boyers, who also is coordinator of safety and security.

The system costs $300,000 over five years. The district in January received a $40,000 grant from the state Commission on Crime and Delinquency that is being used toward that expense, Boyers said. The grant was part of $18.6 million awarded to support physical security or behavioral health needs of students.

The district will pay any costs not covered by the grant but is seeking another grant that, if received, could cover the remainder of the cost.

As part of the system, Plum’s roughly 530-member staff will wear badges that have two functions, Boyers said. They will also be provided to substitutes, with the district able to assign and deactivate them.

Pressing a button on the badge a few times notifies the building level response team — administrators, nurses, school counselors and social workers — that something is wrong, such as a fight or an illness.

The power behind the badge, Boyers explained, is that when one is activated, it pinpoints the person’s location inside or outside a building. A blueprint shows what resources are nearby.

The badges track a person’s location only when activated, he said.

On the second level, if the badge is pressed several times, it triggers a lockdown that takes over the school’s public address system and notifies Plum police that there is a significant emergency, Boyers said.

Further, computer screens are taken over to provide information, and wall-mounted beacons in rooms and hallways serve as visual cues to students and staff that a response is needed.

The system gives all district staff the ability to immediately seek help or report something wrong without the need, and delay, of going to a telephone.

“The whole premise of this is response time,” Boyers said.

District employees will be trained on using the system during a wellness fair Aug. 19. Students return Aug. 21.

Centegix, headquartered in Atlanta, started offering its CrisisAlert system in 2018 after the shooting in February that year at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., said Mary Ford, chief marketing officer.

It has customers in 43 states and is protecting more than 12,000 locations. In addition to schools, it also is used in government, health care and hospitality settings.

“We are the most used panic button for schools in the country,” she said.

The badge — resembling a credit card with a button — is designed to be simple and easy to use, Ford said. It runs on Centegix’s own private managed network so it does not depend on Wi-Fi or cellular service to work.

The company has found that CrisisAlert most often has been used in medical situations and behavior events where a local response from within the school can resolve them.

“We designed it so it is simple,” Ford said. “In a time of crisis, you need to have something that is the absolutely simplest thing to use.”

The system will have Plum ready should Alyssa’s Law be enacted in Pennsylvania.

Named in honor of Alyssa Alhadeff, a victim of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas shooting, it is legislation promoted by Make Our Schools Safe that requires public elementary and secondary schools to be equipped with silent panic alarms directly linked to law enforcement.

Alyssa’s Law has been passed in seven states — Florida, New Jersey, New York, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas and Utah — and is proposed or in progress in nine others, including Pennsylvania.

Pennsylvania Sens. Art Haywood, D-Montgomery/Philadelphia, and Tracy Pennycuick, R-Berks/Montgomery, introduced Alyssa’s Law in May.

If it becomes a requirement, Boyers said, Plum is hopeful funding will come with it.

The philosophy of Make Our Schools Safe that “time equals life” aligns with Centegix’s motto that “every second matters,” Ford said.

“It comes down to the faster that you can get help to the right location, the better chances of a positive outcome,” she said. “Our solution was designed to get help to the right place.”

Plum has been working on implementing the system since December, Boyers said. As part of their consideration, Plum administrators visited Ontario Local Schools, in Ontario, Ohio, west of Mansfield, which already uses the system.

“We learn a lot by talking with other schools,” Boyers said. “We learned a lot from them.”

Plum will be prepared to demonstrate the system to interested administrators from school districts in the area, Boyers said.