Episcopal High School

Integrating Existing Infrastructure and Providing Multiple Notification Options

Overview

Challenge

Location: Alexandria, VA
Campus Type: Urban
Enrollment: 435
Faculty: 65
Campus Size: 130 acres
Building Count: 25

Episcopal High School required a notification solution to integrate with its existing siren alerting system and provide additional alerting support during threats like active shooter scenarios. Boota De Butts, CFO at Episcopal High School, discusses the college preparatory boarding school’s unique challenge and solution.

Challenge

Episcopal High School, a DC-area boarding school with more than 400 residential students, needed an emergency notification system that could offer complete, immediate alerting capabilities. In particular, the school required a notification solution that could integrate with its existing siren alerting system and provide additional alerting support during threats like active shooter scenarios. 

Safety First

Boota De Butts: I was involved in the research to find a solution to our notification problem. We’re a 100% residential boarding school, and our number one focus here is the safety of the students. We start with that premise; we hope we can educate them, and we hope we can teach them some life lessons. But at the end of the day, their parents and families have entrusted the safety of their children to us. 

I think the mere fact that we’re a 100% residential school is a real challenge from a notification standpoint. These are the students’ homes, and we have about 85% of the faculty and their families living here on campus. So, that to some degree makes us unique, in that we don’t have downtime after school lets out or on the weekends; there are people here on campus outside of the school year as well. We’ve got to be vigilant 24/7, 365 days a year. Then you throw in the uniqueness of our boarding school location, which brings its own security concerns. There aren’t many boarding schools 7 miles from the White House, smack dab in one of the major metropolitan areas of the world.

Before Alertus, we created and established what we felt was a very good emergency response system here for various threats. So, we were very good at moving students to safety, and we regularly did drills. When the Virginia Tech shooting took place, we realized that we were not set up to handle that type of incident here on campus. If there was a shooter on campus putting our students in harms way, the last thing you would want to do is move people around. With this realization, we knew we needed to find a system that could communicate across the campus; all the buildings, whether academic, administrative, athletic, or residential. We needed a way to notify the community that a particular incident was happening and for people to take whatever necessary steps to put themselves in safety. 

Solution

Activate Immediately from Anywhere

Boota De Butts: Previously, we used a siren for emergency notification. With the siren, there was only one activation point; you had to physically go to the siren and press the button. The siren wasn’t responsive enough in those instances where you didn't want to want to be running around campus. With Alertus, we can initiate pre-scripted alerts from the front of an Alert Beacon. With 67 Alert Beacons located all around campus, any person at any time can activate an Alert Beacon in the case of an emergency. This would send out a message to the whole system and, at the same time, send text messages and email alerts. If anyone sees something suspicious, you want them to activate the alert immediately; that’s what the Alertus system allows us to do.

We liked the ability to activate the system from any Alert Beacon or any computer. The system’s ability to send out email and SMS alerts and integrate with our siren was exactly what we were looking for—Alertus is a one-stop shop solution. The Alert Beacons have what I call “canned messages” in them—preprogrammed messages to tell anyone (student or adult alike) what corrective action they should be taking. Whether they should stay where they are, whether they should move to a safe place above ground, etc. Alertus also sends out text messages and emails automatically. Inevitably some emergency situation is going to occur where you won’t know the location of every individual on campus; it could be the weekend, when people are spread out all over campus or off campus, it could happen during athletics - it could happen anytime. The Alertus system allows us to communicate quickly and tell everybody what corrective actions we want them to take, no matter where they are on campus.

Integrated System, Multiple Notification Options

Boota De Butts: We've expanded the system because along with all of our buildings, we also have athletics fields. So what we did was integrate the system with our sirens, so when the Alert Beacons go off, the siren does as well. We also have the ability to use Alertus text to speech loudspeakers positioned on buildings on our athletic fields. If students or coaches are out there and hear the siren or the text to speech message, they know to go to the Alert Beacon, read what the message is, and follow instructions. So, we’ve added those features as well, just because with the nature of our campus, everybody isn’t going to be inside a building when we need to notify people of an emergency.

Conclusion

We primarily use Alertus for emergency alerts, but there’s no reason why you can’t use it for campus-wide non-emergencies. If we need an all-campus meeting for something important that may not be life-threatening, we can easily use the Alert Beacons to notify everyone. You can type in “this is not an emergency. Please meet in the chapel—we have an important announcement to make.” With the ability to type custom messages, you can also use the system for general campus communications.

The system gives me a feeling of safety. It’s the backbone of our emergency response system, but how we execute it, activate it, and follow through with it is really left up to us. It’s a powerful, flexible tool you can customize for your campus needs.