Bald Knob School District gets new emergency notification system, modernizing communication efforts
BALD KNOB, Ark. – The Bald Knob School District is taking a new modern approach to communication among teachers, parents, and students.
It’s through a program called Catapult EMS, they’re able to communicate without even talking if there is a threat to the school, or even a spill in the hallway.
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Bald Knob is a tight-knit community where most of the teachers are alumni and send their own kids to school there, like the director of Federal and Special Programs, Marcy Dugger.
“I’m going to give my life to save their life any day of the week,” Dugger said.
Wanting to modernize communications, they purchased Catapult EMS.
“We try our best to up our game, to make sure kids are as safe as possible,” Dugger said.
She helped get the grant for the safety app, making communication among everyone more effective.
“I think the greatest benefit is for us to be able to account for students, very, very, quickly,” Dugger said. “We’ve not had a system like that in the past.”
Using the colors green, yellow, and red, it’s as easy as pulling the phone out of your pocket, to notify teachers across the district, or in specific schools when something is going on. Green means something might just need to be cleaned up before kids go to their next class. The colors coordinate with the severity of the issue.
“The yellow is just a little bit higher incident, there’s a little bit more there,” Dugger said. “It wouldn’t mean that we’re doing a lockdown it just might mean, ‘Hey we’re going to keep kids in the room for a few minutes’ and the red obviously would be full-on lockdown.”
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Superintendent David Bangs said this gives teachers real-time updates and adds to security measures they already have in place.
“We talk about all these different issues that have happened at other schools and we think that can’t happen at our school, and we have to be proactive,” Bangs said.
With her community and students at the forefront of her mind, Dugger said this program will modernize safety efforts.
“We can just give them real-time information as the situation unfolds so that the teacher’s stress level is reduced, and if theirs is reduced, the student’s is reduced as well,” Dugger said
The app and program have several other safety features as well that help get messages across to everyone.
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Other schools also have been using this program. The teachers have been attending training on the system, and it should be fully up and running in the 2024 school year.
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