Being Prepared for an Active Shooter or Building Intruder
Every second matters during an emergency, which is why it’s very important to be prepared in the event of an active shooter or building intruder incident. A school's number one focus should be the safety of faculty and staff and having the right communication tools to reach authorities as quickly as possible.
With end-to-end school safety systems, your school and its people can use this tool to quickly alert personnel and broadcast critical information across devices like IP phones, overhead speakers, desktops, and more during an emergency.
An active shooter or building intruder situation can result in a harmful impact to your people. Having an end-to-end school safety solution is crucial for your emergency plan. Specific alerts can be created to help you address a hostile situation in a streamlined, more efficient manner. Setting up alerts that reach staff members throughout your school’s facility with audio, text, and visual display can raise visibility and situational awareness as well as lead to safer outcomes.
In this blog, you’ll learn about several safety tools that help schools stay safe and prepared during an active shooter or building intruder situation.
The Importance of School Safety Technology
With Intrado Safety Suite, schools can provide a reliable form of communication between staff and students to stay safe and aware during a situation. Safety Suite offers customizable alerts that can be set up for active shooter or building intruder situations. Some of these tools include panic button integrations, visual alerts, automatically-initiated door locks, and more.
Use Cases
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Building Monitoring & Access Control – Building monitoring and access control systems are tools that help keep schools secure. Cameras, badge scanners, and automatic locking systems are common examples of this technology. Most typically run independently and have their own notification tool but alert capabilities are often very limited in functionality (i.e., email or phone call alerts only). By integrating access control systems with mass notification software like Revolution, schools can take their building security to the next level. This integration provides a streamlined process for rapid detection, communication, and incident response.
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Incident Management & Reunification – Safety Shield leverages Intrado’s status as a 911 service provider to offer its users a faster connection to 911 by automatically passing critical data about callers to a 911 call handler, allowing for quicker incident response and more accurate location information sharing.
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Intrado Wearable 911 Panic Button - With Intrado’s Wearable 911 Panic Button, schools can simultaneously alert 911 first responders for assistance while silently notifying staff and instantly initiate a lockdown. Location data, incident details, floor plans and more are automatically shared with first responders via the panic button data which is passed through Intrado Safety Shield.
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Visual Alerts – Strobes and digital signs are a useful tool that can visually alert people of an active shooter incident. These features can grab attention informing people where to go and what to do during an emergency. This tool can also notify those who are hearing impaired.
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In-Building Paging – With in-building paging, you can broadcast pre-recorded, live, or non-emergency information in common areas such as hallway. This is useful to notify faculty like staff members, organizational leaders, or other personnel when assistance is needed. It is also an extremely important tool to rapidly communicate emergency information to anyone within the building that may need to follow lockdown procedures because of a building intruder.
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IP Device Panic Button – The Smart IP Button by Advanced Network Devices (AND) is a small, discrete PoE panic button that automatically registers with Revolution. When someone pushes the button, Revolution automatically alerts your list of predefined recipients. This panic button is typically mounted in a discrete location, such as under a desk, which allows users to silently call for help without the intruder noticing.
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Analog Panic Button – Analog buttons can also be used to activate Revolution notifications using GPIO contact closures. Intrado Revolution can extend the life of your existing analog infrastructure by allowing you to leverage your analog and IP equipment together for mass notifications. This strategy can save customers time and money because you won’t have to rip and replace your equipment or train personnel on how to use a new system. The buttons include lockdown, evacuate, and more.
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User Interface – Panic buttons can be found on the dashboard page in the Revolution user interface. The dashboard buttons enable users to quickly trigger an emergency alert with the click of a button. Each user can create up to three different panic buttons on their dashboard. Customers can use these buttons for a lockdown, active shooter, and more.
