Allegany County Public Schools

Quickly Reaching Students and Staff Across a Large School District

Overview

Location: Allegany County, MD
Enrollment: 9,083
Faculty: 911
County Size: 500 sq. Miles
Building Count: 27

Spread out across 500 square miles, Allegany County Public Schools needed a system capable of sending instantaneous and reliable alerts during times of emergency to buildings spread across hundreds of miles. Previously utilizing nothing more than pagers and cell phones to alert their staff, officials at Allegany County gradually began to recognize that they weren’t getting the coverage and reliability they desired. Realizing the inadequacies of systems that depend on third-party infrastructure, Allegany County sought out a system that operated in-facility.

Challenge

Unlike most college campuses, with numerous buildings situated in one central location, Allegany County Public School’s 27 buildings are spread across 500 square miles. The school system’s massive size presented a unique challenge in terms of emergency notification. Allegany County’s previous methods of notification—pagers and cell phones—simply couldn’t provide a consistent level of reliability or speed.

It quickly became apparent that Allegany County’s reliance on third-party infrastructure, such as cell service, was at the root of their problems with immediate and reliable alert delivery. After reaching this conclusion, the search for a solution began. With the help of Alertus Technologies®, Allegany County created an emergency notification system capable of sending alerts across hundreds of miles with the power, speed, and dependability they desired.

Jeff Blank, supervisor of networking at Allegany County Public School, and Beth Thomas, coordinator of information technology, discuss the school system’s unique challenge and solution.

The Notification Problem

Jeff Blank: The lack of coverage, and just the unreliability of paging and cell service, was mainly what drove us to find a better way to notify our schools. Post 9/11, I was listening to a safety task force group from New York speak. They said that one of the things that they’ve found is that during an emergency, one just couldn’t rely on cell carriers for emergency communications anymore. It kind of got us thinking that if something really bad happened, everyone would be getting on his or her cellphones and the service goes down. So to rely on any cellular system for emergency notification just doesn’t work.

Now we realize that when something bad happens, we have to rely on our own infrastructure. You just can’t count on secondary infrastructure to alert people in your own facility. You need to get the message from the people on the inside directly to who needs to hear the message.

Solution

A System You Can Count On

Jeff Blank: We used to give all of our administrative staff and principals pagers, and we found that people didn’t want to carry them once they got cellphones. We also found that the pagers and cellphones in our schools are fairly unreliable. They just don’t work in some locations, and in the case of pagers, people might forget them, or the batteries might be dead. So the problem was that we would try to do an emergency closing and only hit around 75% of our facilities. Leaving the other 25% in the dark.

So, we like Alertus because it’s in the office; it’s bolted to the wall. Alertus absolutely gives me confidence in our system. To me, it’s the most important thing next to fire alarms and smoke detectors. To this day, we’ve never had any problems—it just sits there and works.

Getting the Right Message to the Right People

Jeff Blank: We each have the ability to send alerts to any of our remote facilities. The way our school system is laid out is different districts. Alertus allows us to group our beacons by district so that if we need to send an alert to just one district we can.”

Beth Thomas: We use Alertus to get early information out to the school system. Things like weather alerts and other emergencies are transmitted from the 911 center to the location. Alertus really speeds up the process of getting information out to who needs it quickly so they can react to the message.