Students can’t learn unless they feel safe, so John McDonald found a way to bring safety to schools. McDonald, COO of the Missouri School Boards’ Association’s Center for Education Safety, made a name for himself as “the lockdown guy” and now works to make schools safer across the state of Missouri. One way he’s doing this is through the continued development of three mobile incident command centers: vans outfitted with the technologies schools need in the face of a crisis.
START HERE: Missouri equips mobile incident command centers for school safety.
Strategically positioned across the state to respond anywhere in a matter of hours, these command centers have technologies to support schools through natural disasters, threats of violence or other safety emergencies.
As McDonald and the MSBA’s Center for Education Safety discover new resources and build new partnerships, these mobile units get upgraded. One focal point for these upgrades is connectivity, both in the traditional sense and in more human ways. Here are three of the latest technologies supporting K–12 students and staff in the face of a disaster:
1. Stay Connected When Wi-Fi and Phone Services Fail
When an incident occurs, the network is often one of the first components to fail.
“The community starts texting and calling at a rapid rate, and it overwhelms the systems. Every critical incident I’ve ever been on, we lose cellphone voice very quickly, and then, a lot of times, the texting crashes also,” McDonald says. “If you have a major traumatic incident in the community, such as the LA wildfires or the North Carolina floods, those systems crash.”
He adds that in rural areas, it doesn’t take much to overwhelm the systems, so support for these technologies can be particularly valuable.
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The mobile incident command centers are partnering with T-Mobile to take advantage of its “network in a box,” McDonald says.
T-Mobile announced earlier this month that its T-Priority solution will allow first responders to take advantage of the company’s 5G stand-alone (SA) network. This gives teams likes McDonald’s “a dedicated slice of its 5G SA network to give them more capacity, faster 5G speeds and the highest priority,” according to a press release.
This can help schools communicate with law enforcement and the community more quickly in a time of urgent need. “In a crisis, when cellphones go down, we can now come to the scene with our own network and have up to 500 connections,” McDonald says. “We can immediately have connectivity when everything has been lost.”
2. Relay Information to the Command Center in Real Time
Communication with first responders in an emergency is necessary, but having insight into exactly what they’re seeing is priceless. The mobile response units are equipped with body cameras and corresponding video feeds for this purpose. The body cameras on the MSBA responders will feed to large screens that allow the team to know exactly what’s happening in real time.
DISCOVER: Displays enhance the school experience beyond the classroom.
“When our people are responding to an incident, they can be livestreaming that video to our command center,” McDonald says.
This adds value in the face of any type of incident. “If it’s a tornado that’s impacted the community, we now have an opportunity to look at that and see what’s happening. If it’s a threat environment, we can help schools understand how to better manage a situation and then share that with the school response teams at their district offices. It provides a unique vantage point we typically don’t have.”
3. Connect Students to Their Breathing and Mental Fortitude
The final piece of any emergency response situation is the incident’s aftermath. “We come in, and we respond for five minutes, five hours or five days. Then, the responders are all gone, but what’s left in the aftermath is the trauma, and that takes years to overcome,” McDonald says.
His organization is partnering with Healium to provide virtual reality experiences meant to improve users’ mental health.
RELATED: Make space for community and student well-being in your schools.
“The crisis mental health piece is the most complicated in any response,” McDonald explains. “Not being able to breathe or not being able to process is very real, and this helps calm you down.”
He adds that they’re still testing the full effect of the experiences on students and teachers in the aftermath of an incident, but they’ve seen positive results from participants so far. “We can start finding pathways to recovery and support that with technology.”
