Bristol Tennessee City Schools demonstrates how crisis alert system works
BRISTOL, Tenn. (WJHL) — Bristol, Tennessee City Schools (BTCS) demonstrated how its crisis alert system works to notify faculty, staff, and students of an emergency or to receive assistance.
Currently, Tennessee High, Tennessee Middle, and Fairmount Elementary use the CENTEGIX CrisisAlert badge that faculty and staff wear.
“This system allows an immediate response,” said Kristie Coleman, BTCS Supervisor of Student Services. “You don’t have to have a radio for every staff, you don’t have to have a phone in every room. But just by something you wear every day, you can get all the help and support you need.”
The badge has a button located on it that allows school workers to send out an alert. There are primarily three different alerts that are sent. The staff alert, the lockdown alert, and the evacuation alert.
The number of times a school worker presses the button will notify others what type of situation they’re in.
“If they press it like three times, that just lets us know that’s just the staff alert,” Sherman Eury, Tennessee Middle School SRO, said. “If they press it more than that, and I think it’s eight times, then it puts us in a lockdown situation, which is extremely serious.”
Eury said the alert system adds an extra layer of protection and helps with response time.
“As soon as the button is actually hit, it’s a matter of seconds to where we know exactly where that alert, the crisis alert is coming from,” Eury said. “So we’re able to look at our phone immediately, see the location of where the actual alert is coming from. And then we just go to that location.”
Both Coleman and Eury said the staff alert is most commonly used. That alert sends administrators a notification asking for assistance which is often medical needs or behavioral help with students.
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Coleman said the evacuation alert is not often used. However, legislation has been introduced in the General Assembly that would require schools to develop a plan to assess the situation before evacuating in the event a fire alarm was pulled because of an active shooter.
“[It would] let the administrators pull up the videos, pull up all our resources, make sure that it is not a fire or intruder or some other reason that’s going off,” Coleman said. “And then from their phones, or the app they can control to send and evacuate everyone out of the building.”
Bristol Tennessee City Schools plan to have the CENTEGIX CrisisAlert badge at the rest of its campuses by the end of the school year.
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