Solutions | Education

Campuswide Emergency Notifications

A local high school requires a solution to quickly notify students, faculty, and staff of emergency situations such as an armed intruder on campus, an approaching tornado, a fire evacuation, etc.  While sounding alarms is an effective way for the majority of the school population, the campus must also provide a visual indication for those students that are hearing impaired.  Visual indicators would also allow the school to alert the population without agitating any armed intruder.

Solving this challenge will benefit the school in the following ways:

• The campus will accommodate the hearing impaired to ensure all its population is aware of certain types of emergency situations, leading to a safer environment
• Insurance rates are potentially reduced due to the school’s improvement of its emergency notification process
• Addressing the hearing impaired leads to higher special education student enrollment, which drives higher funding from the state
• An effective alert system will act as a deterrent to potential acts of violence
• Increased student safety will result in a happier, more supportive parent community

Solution

The focus of this solution is using color graphic images to the screen of IP phones to indicate certain types of emergency situations.

• Available colors supported by IP phones allows the school to select various contrasting shades to represent various types of emergencies through application administrative interfaces
• Because receiving notifications of a perceived emergency significantly disrupts the education environment, the emergency notification process is password protected, requiring a special pin number to be entered
• Gradual shade changes can be used to indicate changes in severity of the situation, with each shade being driven by dialing an internal extension and selecting a speed dial button or icon
• A user hits a speed dial button or an icon reserved for indicating a specific type of emergency, changing the entire screen of a group of targeted phones a certain color
• The color filled phone screen is refreshed every five to seven seconds, indicating the emergency situation still persists
• A user hits a speed dial button or an icon reserved for clearing emergencies, changing the entire screen of a group of targeted phones a certain color
• The targeted phones are selected according to what speed dial button or icon is selected or what extension is entered.

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