Ballarat Clarendon College
Overview
Location: Ballarat, Victoria, Australia
Enrollment: 1,200+
School Type: Co-educational, K-12
Schools worldwide share a significant duty: to protect their students, teachers, and staff. Ballarat Clarendon College, a private day and boarding school located in Ballarat, Victoria, Australia, added a mass notification system (MNS) to their campus to protect their community’s safety day and night.
Adam Ryan, Capital Works, Infrastructure, and ICT Manager, has been with Ballarat Clarendon for 16 years, starting in IT and then becoming ICT Manager. He has a dual role as the Capital Works and Infrastructure Manager, ensuring broader technical consistency across the school’s buildings, infrastructure, and IT systems.
Challenge
Before installing the Alertus System on their campus, Ballarat Clarendon College did not have an MNS and manually distributed alerts when needed. In particular, their Junior School campus did not have phones in the classrooms.
“Alertus’ MNS has allowed our teaching staff the ability to call for emergency assistance through the use of the Alertus Desktop Activator software when required,” said Ryan. “This can be achieved anywhere on campus without reliance on our phone system. The preset workflow then triggers a series of SMS messages, desktop screen takeovers, and emails to ensure that immediate attention is given.”
Solution
The wall-mounted Alertus Alert Beacon® sounds, flashes, and displays an alert message in the event of an emergency.
When deciding on an MNS, Ryan liked Alertus’ customizable suite of products. “Alertus offered the best integration to allow us to expand the system when we choose,” he said. “The integration with Active Directory ensures it actively monitors our computers and users, allowing for failsafe actions by monitoring endpoints. The Alertus server actively monitors all devices to ensure connectivity and notifies if there are errors.”
“We also have the Alertus Enhanced Notification Service (ENS) package, Alertus Desktop Activator, several USB Panic Buttons, a hardwired Panic Button, the Alertus Mobile Recipient and Activator App, and an Alert Beacon®,” said Ryan.
Conclusion
The Alertus System has been used several times for anaphylaxis events at Ballarat Clarendon’s Junior campus, and they plan to extend the system to all laptops across their organization so that both of their campuses will have access to the system for alerting of anaphylaxis, asthma, intruder, or other emergency events.
“The Alertus System has greatly benefited our organization as it has allowed immediate mass notification for our emergency processes, such as anaphylaxis and asthma events that can be life-threatening if medical support is not engaged immediately,” said Ryan.
In addition to its Alertus System, Ballarat Clarendon has a separate building security system. They are looking to add more products from the Alertus suite to merge their mass notification and security processes.