St. Benedict’s Preparatory School

Integrating with Existing Technologies to Provide Complete Notification Coverage

Overview

Location: Newark, NJ
Campus Type: Urban
Enrollment: 554
Faculty: 51
Campus Size: 12 acres
Number of Buildings: 15

Like most educational institutions, St. Benedict’s Preparatory School has been mindful of the increase in school shootings across the country. With an air horn and email/texting system already in place, St. Benedict’s realized the need for a more comprehensive emergency alerting system. More specifically, the school needed a way to quickly get emergency alerts out to all faculty, staff, and students across campus.

Omar Feliciano, Director of Student Services at St. Benedict’s Preparatory School, discusses the school system’s unique challenge and solution.

Challenge

One of the most recent things that have happened has been all the shootings going around at schools. We started thinking about how we could alert everybody if there were an active shooter or a situation like that. 

We have our regular fire alarm and an air horn system because here, we don’t have any speakers throughout the school. We don’t have any PA system at all.  So many announcements we make in the morning are in front of the whole school. We meet every morning to take attendance and do whatever announcements have to be made at that time. In an emergency, our form of reaching somebody at that point would have been emailing, texting, or walking around and finding the person.

We have a Honeywell email and text emergency alert system; that was one way we distributed information. Somebody would go into that system, create the message, and send it out to everybody. We mainly used the system to announce delays in school openings, school closings, and any major announcements where we would need to reach many people.

Solution

Comprehensive Emergency Notification

The reason we chose Alertus is that it’s easy for our faculty to know what’s going on. With our air horn system, anybody can sound an air horn, but you don’t really know what’s going on. Most of the classrooms don’t have phones in them, so if a security guard didn’t send out a speaker announcement, office people would be the only ones that would hear it. We chose Alertus more for the ease of use of the system, which doesn’t take a brain surgeon to work.

We still have our air horns installed in strategic locations. We also have four TV screens around the school that display announcements. The system is connected to those screens. As soon as the beacons sound, they send out a message on the screen. It was more ease of access to quickly find out what is the issue at hand.

Establishing a Safe and Secure Environment

We wanted faculty and people that are here daily to feel some safety. If something did happen, the system that we have in place would set the beacons off and sound the air horns.

Our goal is to cover the entire school with Alert Beacons. Right now, they are scattered in strategic areas throughout the school where when people hear the alert, they can read the message and follow emergency procedures that we have put in place. 

The idea was to get one beacon on each floor of every building so we didn’t have to use the horn because sometimes the horn doesn’t work. To be able to put a beacon in an area where you’re able to hear it and have access to it, that’s the main idea we have.

Conclusion

Fire Panel Integration

We had a fire alarm go off recently; there was smoke somewhere on the property. That made us consider whether the Alert Beacon and fire panel can talk to one another.

We’re trying to determine if the system can connect to our fire alarm system. We’re talking to our fire alarm company to see if we can have those two systems coincide so that when we do have a fire alarm, the beacons can go off, and people can see exactly what it is.

Preparing for Emergency Scenarios

One main thing that concerns us, and maybe any other institution, is a disgruntled student coming back, perhaps a parent coming back. Something else that we’ve thought about is that our lower field is used as a helipad. If there were some emergency where that crashed, we would be able to sound the beacons and evacuate. 

We have a school-wide safety manual that highlights and goes over 15–20 different types of emergencies. In that manual, we stress fire alarms, active shooter-type lockdowns, and a shelter-in-place situation. As things happen, we start thinking about ways to use the system.