Tested and True

Aug 1, 2007 12:00 PM, By Ashley Roe

On April 16, Ware County in Southeast Georgia experienced the beginning sparks of a wildfire later designated as the largest fire in the history of the Southern United States. About 10 miles south of Waycross, Ga., near the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge, a fallen power line ignited a group of dead trees, sparking the Sweat Farm Road Fire. According to the Southern Area Coordination Center (http://gacc.nifc.gov/sacc/), one of 11 regional natural disaster and incident management coordination centers in the United States, the flames spread from 1,000 to more than 20,000 acres in less than 24 hours between April 16 and 17.

Amid the evacuation of hundreds of residents living on the outskirts of the city and in the fire's path, Ware County school district administrators had to determine the best emergency procedures to protect the students and staff at its 12 schools. Smoke from the growing fire had blanketed Waycross, a 13,500-resident city, and school administrators decided that running school buses throughout smoke-clouded roads was too dangerous. “We decided on April 16 to close the schools for the following day,” says Theresa Martin, Ware County Schools director of public relations. With the wildfire threat looming, the schools were forced to close intermittently for a period of about two weeks following their initial closing.

Just six months before, the school district had decided to install Instant Alert for Schools, a Web-based notification service from Honeywell, Morris Township, N.J., that would allow it to reach parents quickly with emergency information and school announcements. Administrators did not expect the system to be put to the test so soon.

Instant Alert for Schools broadcasts messages to phones, cell phones, pagers, e-mail and PDAs. To use the system, a representative from the school district initiates an alert via the Internet or phone. Once the alert message is drafted and complete, it is broadcast to all relevant contact points. Using a Web-based interface, parents can update their contact information and specify how they prefer to be reached, for example, by e-mail for routine messages and announcements, and by e-mail and cell phone for emergency information.

During the school closures, Ware County school administrators had to decide each evening whether to keep the schools closed the following day, based on updated information regarding the weather, smoke forecast, the fire and its containment. “After we made the determination, we made calls to parents every night to give them a status report,” Martin says. “This was our first real need for a system such as Instant Alert, and it became crucial during this time.”

The Instant Alert system replaced the traditional phone trees that the district had used previously for emergency notification at each of its schools. During the wildfire threat, the system made calls and sent messages to the parents of its 6,500 students, a number that would have made the phone tree communication procedure increasingly time-consuming. “There are no words to express the value of this system to our school during the fire and the confusion it eliminated,” Martin says.

In addition to emergency communication, Instant Alert for Schools can also be used for routine communication with parents, such as school-wide and individual school announcements and truancy reports. Karla Lemmon, Instant Alert product manager for Honeywell Building Solutions, says that use of the system — which is currently installed in about 1,300 U.S. schools — has grown in part because of America's increasingly mobile society and because school administrators realize that it can be used for more than just emergency communication. “The system has been on the market since 2004, and it was born out of Sept. 11 to solve the problem of parents not knowing what was happening with their kids in an emergency,” she says. “Once schools had it in their hands, they began to use it in other ways.”

For example, Newport Independent Schools in Newport, Ky., uses the system to combat absenteeism. The system is set up to confirm student attendance and absences through a school-to-home notification service. After a year of using the system, the district increased its Average Daily Attendance from 93.6 to 95.1 percent, saving $80,000 of state funding.

Lemmon says that Instant Alert stands apart from other emergency notification systems that primarily use text messaging. “Text-only systems can often fail because cell phones can only hold so much of the message contents through their memory. Cell phone towers can also go down,” she says. “Instant Alert allows for an unlimited number of contact points, including e-mail. Parents can choose how they want the information sent, and they can maintain their contact information through the Web interface.” The system can also send attached files, such as work schedules, lunch menus and truancy logs, as is the case with the Newport School District's system. In addition, subgroups can be added, such as clubs, sports teams, parent organizations and grade levels, so parents can receive customized information related to group events.

With the Sweat Farm Road Fire 98 percent contained as of July 24, according to the Georgia Forestry Commission (http://www.gatrees.org), the Ware County School District remains satisfied with its emergency alerting system. In the future, the district plans to use the system to improve a variety of routine communications, currently handled by automatic dialers, such as notifying parents when a bus is running late.

The school district also plans to install Honeywell's Digital Video Manager (DVM), a video management and surveillance system that will increase visibility of activities going on inside the county's schools. The system will consist of a closed-circuit television (CCTV) system and cameras installed at the district's two middle schools, as well as an upgrade to existing cameras at Ware County High School. School officials will be able to view, record, play back and store security video clips.

“New technologies can help schools meet a number of the challenges, from upgrading security to improving communication with parents,” says Joe Puishys, president of Honeywell Building Solutions. “With offerings like DVM and Instant Alert, we can help districts keep students safe and provide an environment where teachers and administrators can focus on educating students.”

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