Alvarado Independent School District

Overview

Location: Johnson County, TX
Enrollment: 3,402
Faculty: 200
County Size: 96 sq. miles
Campus/District Building Locations: 10

Spread across nearly 100 square miles and reliant on the National Weather Service for up-to-date information on threatening weather situations, the school district sought a quick, easy-to-use solution that would integrate with systems like WeatherBug to notify faculty and students of tornado watches and warnings quickly.

Challenge

Alvarado Independent School District needed a unified mass notification system to streamline communication and improve student and staff safety. After installing several Alert Beacons, the school district realized the full potential of the Alertus system’s usability when connecting with city authorities in various emergencies.

Jason Smith, assistant network administrator at Alvarado Independent School District, and Kyle Berger, executive director of technical services, discuss the school system’s unique challenge and solution.

Solution

After installing several Alert Beacons, the school district realized the full potential of the Alertus system’s usability when connecting with city authorities on various emergencies.

Jason Smith, assistant network administrator at Alvarado Independent School District, and Kyle Berger, executive director of technical services, discuss the school system’s unique challenge and solution.

Integration with WeatherBug

We heard about Alertus via WeatherBug weather detection software; as part of a package deal with them, we received an Alert Beacon. After we started looking at what the Alert Beacon was and what it could do, we made the decision to use the system to push out alerts to all of our locations.

We sometimes have pretty bad storms here, including tornados; we’ve really put Alertus through the paces. WeatherBug will issue numerous tornado watches/warnings; with the integration of Alertus and WeatherBug, our system automatically sends predefined alert messages whenever the National Weather Service sends out severe weather warnings.

Automated weather alerts are important for not only the tornado warnings but also any weather threats that could be dangerous for our athletes out on the fields or the playgrounds. With the automated instant WeatherBug alerts through the Alertus system, instead of someone calling around or activating a call tree, we know the alerts will go out instantly.

Additional Notification Coverage

In addition to severe weather, there’s also a chance for the types of threats that people don’t want to talk about. A few years ago, before we had Alertus, there was a local bank robbed not too far from our schools. It took us longer than we would have liked to get the notification out to all the schools to initiate a lockdown. With any kind of a physical threat to any of our schools, it’s very important to us to get that information out as quickly as possible.

Before Alertus, we pretty much relied on your traditional communications systems: calling each campus location, sending out emails to the campus personnel, basically a phone call going out to the campuses detailing what processes we deemed necessary. The problem was, as you know, when somebody makes the call and that message goes from one person to another, sometimes that critical information gets changed. You really need to get the most accurate information to the most important people, every time.

Conclusion

Alertus gives us the simple but crucial ability for people to push a button on the Alert Beacon to acknowledge that they’ve gotten the message. For instance, when an alert is activated, we know instantly (within seconds) when each location acknowledged the alert and became aware of the threat. We don’t have to wonder whether the right person got the message or how long it took for them to acknowledge the alert. With Alertus, you know that you sent the correct information to the right people.

Since our IT department oversees city IT operations, we will be placing Alert Beacons in our police dispatch, fire locations, and so forth here in town. That way, authorities will get the same alerts that our schools get, so they're also alerted if we have a situation on campus. We’ll also have that backward compatibility as well, so the police dispatch can initiate an alert themselves; as soon as they get information, we can get the message to go into lockdown.

We’re also looking at possible integration with our school buses down the line—Wi-Fi access to our buses so that we could install Alert Beacons on the dash and alert the fleet while they’re on the road.