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Sep 1, 2006 12:00 PM, By Ashley Roe

Spanning a total of 300,000 square feet in urban Washington, D.C., McKinley Technology High School, the second largest school in the District of Columbia school system, posed a security challenge for its education and administrative staff.

With 800 students combing the campus each day, the school's 50 administrative personnel and 39 teachers needed the ability to instantly communicate critical information during incidents and emergencies. As in many public and private schools across the United States, the possibility of a shooting incident, terrorist attack or weather emergency occurring at or near the school remains on every employee's mind. In order to maintain safety and keep students secure, school employees — from bus drivers to principals — needed the means to immediately assess and resolve situations.

Along with quick emergency assessment, school officials were also looking for a way to increase the effectiveness of discipline by decreasing the lag time between a student infraction and a report. “There tended to be a long time between when something happened and when something was reported,” says Principal Dan Gohl. “I wanted to find a way to shrink the time between operation and response.”

Gohl turned to Mobile Guardian, a software application designed to strengthen security by tracking school incidents, storing student records and communicating information wirelessly to multiple users at once.

Manufactured by Defywire Inc., Herndon, Va., Mobile Guardian works off either tablet or pocket PCs and desktop computers to give users the ability to share information and communicate answers while working in the field. Jill Stelfox, Defywire chief executive officer, developed the idea for software with instant communication and tracking capabilities after her complications in locating her two children on Sept. 11, 2001. “In my office in New York City, I got a notice from FedEx that day telling me where my package was, but I didn't know where my children were,” she says. “That was insane, that we can track a silly letter, but we don't know where our children are.”

Mobile Guardian contains a suite of eight applications that securely store student schedule, grade, medical and attendance information. In addition, the software offers incident forms, visitor logs, a bus-tracking system and a group locator, which keeps track of school organization members and their group advisors.

Stelfox says the software was developed with the idea that it can be tailored to each user's needs. “For instance, if a child has an epileptic seizure on the school bus, the bus driver knows who to contact because he or she has access to that child's emergency point-of-contact through a mobile device supplied with Mobile Guardian,” she says. “Moreover, a nurse doesn't need to know information about a child's grades, but he or she does need to know information about the child's medical condition. We want to put the right information into the right people's hands at the right time.”

Mobile Guardian was initially put to the test in spring 2004 in Virginia's Fairfax County school system, just outside of Washington, D.C. With 166,000 students attending 241 schools, the school system wanted to improve its responses to health, safety and security emergencies. “We saw implementing Mobile Guardian as the most effective way to enable access to vital information where and when it is needed most,” says Ted Davis, Fairfax County Public Schools director of Knowledge Asset Management.

The system began outfitting 100 users, mainly bus drivers and staffers on field trips, with mobile devices equipped with the software. “Then we learned there was a bigger need than that,” Stelfox says. The school system eventually equipped all 241 of its schools with the technology and identified 10 different user groups who could benefit from having access to the software.

“One of the things we uncovered through testing was the question of how do you get people on the move very quickly in an emergency?” Stelfox says. Part of accomplishing this, she explains, lies in knowing where each student is at any given time in the school day. “Because we're tracking class by class and student by student in the school, we can tell you which students are absent and which students are present and where,” she says. “So if there are 20 children around and a shooter enters, the teacher will know exactly who is there and who is not.”

Gohl of McKinley Technology High School says the software improves the quality of human interaction and makes his security staff more valuable and accountable. “Mobile Guardian uses a concept of ‘parallel informing,’ which solves that problem of the time lag between operation and response,” he says. “It fixes the problem with a single interface.”

McKinley School was outfitted with the Mobile Guardian software and user devices in early 2005 over two six-hour visits.

Gohl found that his school's disciplinary problems decreased in the months following the installation. “Kids don't respond to disciplinary responses that are two days old,” he says, citing that Mobile Guardian gives him and his colleagues the means to deal with disciplinary problems almost immediately after they occur. “The sooner you can respond to a problem, the more you can prevent it from escalating,” he says. In addition, Gohl says he no longer has to wait hours before he confers with his assistant principals over an issue. “I can send them messages, and we can talk about situations in real time, without traveling back to the office,” he says.

Stelfox believes that principals and teachers benefit equally from using Mobile Guardian in their schools. “I think principals have more control over their information and teachers have more time to teach,” she says. “However, my ultimate goal with Mobile Guardian is to make parents the group who benefits the most. I would love to see the day when parents receive messages saying ‘the bus is five minutes away’ or ‘Ricky did not arrive for third-period history.’”

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