The Alarm bell goes off, three short bursts and the strobes start flashing.

This is the real deal, are you confident your students and staff remember precisely what to do?

It wasn’t so long ago that you only had to juggle two alerts – evacuate for fire, or move to a shelter for the weather. If students got mixed up, it only took a minute or so to redirect them and get everyone to safety.

Intruders, active shooter, lockdown, all clear, fire or weather. Each has its own set of needs and instructions all focused on “where do I go?” The wrong move or a minute’s delay can mean life or death.

What if, clear and accurate instructions could be reinforced with visual messages alongside the audio signals being sent throughout your building simultaneously?

Once these types of systems were cost prohibitive, however with today’s technology advances these critical systems exist in cost-effective packages that integrate all your critical communications.

But what does it really do?

Imagine in a fire. The alarms go off. Simultaneously a message appears on every display, in each classroom, hallways, and offices, stating, “This is not a drill, please exit via the southwest corridors” while near the main entrance different egress routes are posted.

And it happened automatically without human intervention triggered by the fire alarm.

Now what if a teacher could trigger a lockdown from the classroom that notifies the office, starts a recording of the audio message announcing a lockdown, and notifies the rest of the building with the same clear location based instructions of what to do. Unfortunately, in recent history, we have seen what a difference seconds can make in an active shooter situation. There’s no time for confusion or missteps when moving students and staff into the correct safe location based on the event.

Technology has finally caught up to the point where these systems are now practical to implement from a cost perspective and can be used to augment every aspect of your planning and communications. Your systems can adapt to your needs and plans – you do not need to adapt your plans to your systems!

Share your story – Comment below with your drill nightmares, what happened?