America’s Safe Schools Week takes place each October to draw attention to the continuing problem of school violence as well as educate communities about how schools can be made safer and more secure. Safe Schools Week offers an opportunity to address these important issues and take steps to ensure that schools offer students and staff alike an environment that allows them to perform to the best of their abilities.
The National School Safety Center, an independent non-profit organization originally established by Presidential mandate in 1984, created Safe Schools Week to motivate key education and law enforcement policymakers, as well as students, parents and community members, to vigorously advocate for safe schools. School safety includes keeping campuses free of crime and violence as well as improving disciplinary policies and increasing student attendance. Schools that are free of violence, weapons and drugs are essential to ensure the well-being of all students and the quality of their education.
Why Things Need to Improve
While considerable progress is being made to ensure that all of our nation’s schools are safe, secure and productive, and despite most schools having existing safety programs, it’s often the case that these plans need a conscientious, creative application in order to improve their effectiveness.
Another obstacle to protecting schools is the use of outdated or disparate systems for preparing for and responding to an incident. One way your school can work to make things safer is through technology and software solutions. Create next-generation safety for your school with technologies that help you detect, analyze, communicate and respond. With help from an integrated, mission-critical ecosystem where the technology can “talk” to one another, your school can be better equipped to respond to everyday incidents as well as prepare for critical emergencies.
Tapping Technology to Increase School Safety
Motorola Solutions’ security ecosystem offers peace of mind for staff and students by promoting increased school safety. Our four modular blocks of technology solutions address each step of the workflow that are critical for incident response:
- Detect: Ensuring the safety of your school campus can be a challenge. From controlling comings and goings with access control to monitoring perimeters with license plate recognition, detection plays a key role in enabling you to see who’s on campus. Detection is critical for minimizing potential risks, improving situational awareness and increasing early detection.
- Analyze: Proactively monitoring campuses using artificial intelligence is critical to enabling you to take action before an incident even occurs. Powerful video analytics help connect the dots in your data to identify suspicious activities and search video footage, so you can turn the unknowns into insights. Every day, you’re responsible for maintaining the safety of hundreds of students. Analytics technology provides real-time insights into student and staff activities across campus. These analytics solutions are crucial to cutting through the noise, recognizing what’s important and highlighting unusual and concerning behaviors on your campus.
- Communicate: Communications must be effortless, instant and interoperable. Whether it’s a routine fire drill or an emergency situation, uncompromising communication across devices from radios to cell phones is key to creating a connected campus. Connectivity, both on and off campus, is an important part of creating a safe and collaborative educational environment. It is paramount to have communications that instantly and reliably connect your security, administration, bus drivers and staff so you and your team are always aware. A connected campus is a protected one.
- Respond: When an incident occurs, you need to provide a quick and informed first response. Every second matters when you need to mobilize. That’s why being ready and aware makes a critical difference. A comprehensive action plan ensures your personnel are able to respond calmly and effectively while linking directly with local law enforcement. When each second counts, you need to rely on software and devices that seamlessly connect school personnel with local law enforcement, enabling a rapid response that helps prevent incidents from becoming tragedies. When lives depend on timely action, failure’s not an option. Whether it’s an everyday situation or an emergency, real-time intelligence and connectivity with public safety makes a critical difference in ensuring a quick and effective response.
Be Prepared to Address Security Situations
Utilizing available technology solutions can connect your school to new levels of security as well as provide peace of mind.
License Plate Recognition (LPR) technology allows you to accurately capture vehicle license plate information. LPR analytics automatically reads license plate information and links it to live and recorded video, enabling you to search and quickly find specific captured license plate video for help in verification and investigations. Before anyone even enters your doors, you and your staff can have an assessment of who, what and why that person may be coming to your school.
In addition to detecting someone before they even reach your doors, it’s just as important to avoid access by unauthorized individuals into your school. That’s where an access control system can help. Our Access Control Manager (ACM) is a physical access control system designed to protect people, property and assets. With advanced alarm and identity management, ACM provides superior control of access to facilities. Its unification with the Access Control Center (ACC) video management software offers you a powerful, end-to-end security solution to monitor and secure your campus.
When an incident does occur, you need to have the right incident management solution to ensure a proper response. Enhance your school’s incident and records management with help from Ally’s customizable record fields and multimedia attachments, all accessible from any web-enabled device. Ally Security Incident and Records Management helps you make more proactive decisions, automatically manage your incident records and dispatch and communicate instantly across devices.
Seconds matter in an unfolding situation. Our workflow automation tool, Orchestrate, integrates with your existing technology ecosystem to join individual processes, fully manage and optimize workflows and deliver a consistent response every time. Giving you the ability to focus on what matters, and automating the rest.
Safe Schools Technology In Action:
In partnership with Motorola Solutions and our mission-critical ecosystem, you can get to work now on creating next-generation school safety at your campus. Detect, analyze, communicate and respond more effectively so you can keep your students and staff safe. Our available technology solutions will help you make more proactive decisions and reach a new level of security.
Learn more about our solutions for safer schools and our available security solutions.
