The Safety Implications and Importance of Total Coverage

Our nation seems to be locked in an unending battle to keep our school communities safe havens for learning and growth, free from violent acts like the active shooter tragedies that have left in their wake unimaginable devastation. Unceasingly, education and law enforcement officials wrestle with what to do to keep their students, faculty, staff, and visitors safe during an emergency. At Eastern DataComm, we have been helping US schools transform their emergency notification with customized, integrated technology solutions for years. And today, we’re sharing one of the most essential components of emergency notification: total emergency communication coverage.

What Does Total Coverage Really Mean and Why Is That Benchmark Too Often Missed?

‘Total coverage’ means that everyone within school buildings and on campus grounds – and we do mean everyone, from students to new substitute teachers to visitors – can swiftly receive and understand emergency notifications. This cornerstone of the school safety ecosystem may seem like an obvious one. However, countless times, during our School Safety Audits, we unearth vulnerabilities that truly take an expert eye to be able to reveal. Though safety is a paramount concern for all school officials, it takes a partner with both the technology savvy and thorough understanding of school operations and facilities to map out and execute the solution implementation that achieves total coverage.

That said, we find at times that schools are unknowingly providing safety solutions that only achieve partial coverage. While it’s clear that such an oversight is not intentional, it may lead to a false sense of security when there are potentially devastating gaps in the emergency notification process.

Missing the total coverage benchmark may look different depending on the school. Perhaps an older paging system is in use that still ‘works’, but doesn’t deliver messages that are clearly audible and able to be understood by all. Alternatively, there may not be enough speakers in loud or outdoor areas, so again, a message can be missed when there are other sound/noise elements at play. Another frequent case we encounter is that some schools will opt to rely on a single mode of notification like a text alert-only system to provide notifications without realizing that single-mode communication has notable downsides.

In each of these cases, there is a greater chance that someone or a group of people may not receive or understand the emergency notification in a way that allows them to respond accordingly when every second counts.

What Total Coverage and True Preparedness Looks Like

Families, school leaders, and district administrators know that unless 100% of those in their buildings and on their grounds are notified in the event of an emergency, they’re not truly prepared to respond fully. Lack of total coverage introduces the possibility for error and puts people in harm’s way.

In light of this knowledge, it’s important to consider what true preparedness through total coverage means for school communities and districts.

The key to achieving total coverage is the ability to use technology solutions like the paging and related systems as comprehensively as possible. Complete coverage, no doubt, includes an indoor and outdoor PA system and accompanying wireless speakers. It will also include visual cues such as LED beacons and signboards in high-volume or noise-polluted areas such as cafeterias, gymnasiums, and music rooms. The goal is to have both auditory and visual cues reach such spaces, even the remote areas like parking lots and sports fields.

This multimodal approach to total coverage ensures that no matter where someone might be on your school campus grounds, they can be easily and near-instantaneously made aware of an emergency situation once the threat is recognized.

Common Challenges to Achieving Total Coverage

While total coverage is an extremely important component of the school safety ecosystem, there are often factors that can impede a school community from achieving it.

The challenges to overcome may include, but are not limited to:

  • Loud areas within a building (like cafeterias and gyms)
  • Distant outdoor spaces (like remote parking lots and sports fields)
  • Areas where students don’t have phone/smart device access (like technical education classrooms, athletic practices, or labs)
  • Unique structural design considerations (especially in older buildings) that can impair signal, and ultimately message reception

Additional considerations are at play for schools that serve special needs or other unique populations when emergency notification and communication are concerned. This warrants solutions that are custom-tailored to enable all present on campus to know of an impending threat regardless of ability.

We’ve found that administrators and leaders at these schools understand this critical importance. When it comes to their pursuit of total coverage, it’s of top priority that they do all they can to understand potential shortcomings in their emergency notification approach. Through careful examination of facilities and daily operations, it becomes possible to ensure that these students are able to receive and act upon emergency notifications.

This is especially true when a school has a unique population. When working with St. Joseph’s School for the Blind, for example, Eastern DataComm collaborated with school officials to design a solution and develop a project plan that recognized the needs of the students with special needs, specifically visual impairments. The system featured multimodal approaches to notification that went beyond typical text or audio notification. This resulted in a custom-tailored solution that keeps all persons on campus connected and protected.

Total Coverage Is Unique to You

Just as schools that serve special populations must address some unique facets of total coverage, it’s important to understand that your school or district’s total coverage solution will look different than another school or district’s approach. Through serving hundreds of schools over the years, our team has learned that it is the absolute truth: No two schools are exactly alike. Your needs and vulnerabilities will inform how you set your school up for success and how you address your school’s challenges to achieve total notification coverage.

At Eastern DataComm, we understand comprehensive system design and work with your building and facility managers to best serve your school’s structural blueprint in unison with your existing technology footprint. We strive for a seamless integration that allows for all systems, across facilities, to work together to provide the best in total coverage.

For instance, some areas incur more noise pollution than others. We adapt our approach to ensure there is no disruption of emergency notification messaging, regardless of competing sounds. The result is not simply the placement across the entirety of your school grounds, but the use of additional speakers, or visual cues like signboards and LED beacons where you need them most (from technical education classrooms and gyms to fields and parking lots).

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Total Coverage Means Taking Sound Quality and Audibility Seriously

Another important aspect of total coverage involves working with a technology partner that understands the vital part audibility and sound quality play when it comes to emergency notification.

Just as you wouldn’t rely on a single mode of notification, you don’t want to rely on a mode of communication that’s hard to hear or comprehend.

At Eastern DataComm, our consultative and diagnostic process involves an in-depth approach to evaluating your needs. We don’t rely on any ‘guess and check’ approaches to technology solution implementation because our methodology is practical, not just theoretical. Our assessment uses tactics to get a true sense of your school campus’s needs, strengths, and potential vulnerabilities. We use that information to inform the recommendations we make regarding how you and your school community can achieve total coverage.

And because we’ve been working for years with hundreds of schools of various sizes and populations, you can feel confident that you’ve chosen the right technology partner. No matter the scale of what comprises your buildings and grounds, we have the prior project experience and practical knowledge to give you the best-in-class safety and communications solutions.

Understanding, for example, how elements like carpet, hardwood, cement walls, student activity, and indoor or outdoor space can impact the acoustics of a space or otherwise impact the ability for notification to be received and understood – that expertise separates us from others in the field who provide one-size-fits-all solutions that leave vulnerabilities on the table and potential for catastrophe to creep in to a school’s safety ecosystem. When you work with Eastern DataComm, the result is total coverage when you need it most.

Bring Total Coverage to Your School Community with Eastern DataComm

For a comprehensive approach to keeping your community safe through total emergency notifications coverage, contact Eastern DataComm for a complimentary School Safety Consultation.

Empowering Schools With Insight That Helps Protect Their Communities

With the Parkland school shooting trial making headlines and the memory of the recent Uvalde, Texas, shooting in mind, there’s no more pressing a time than now to focus on school district campus-wide safety protocols.

At Eastern DataComm, we’re as committed as ever to empowering school districts across the country to take proactive steps in protecting their school communities, with the goal of preventing incidents like those named above and a long list of others from ever happening again. Responding effectively and swiftly should these potentially devastating events transpire is the absolute best way to mitigate damage and loss of life.

For this reason, our team will be traveling near and far this fall to host an educational seminar series called What Schools Must Do to Prepare for a Lockdown or an Active Shooter Event. We’ll be visiting a number of towns in New Jersey and Connecticut, doing our part to share this valuable information with school officials. We’ll continue to expand our footprint with these educational opportunities, so stay tuned for when our team will be in a town near you.

Today, we’d like to share a preview of those presentations with you so you know what is in store for our attendees with the hopes that you’ll be joining us in the upcoming weeks.

What We’ll Cover In Our Upcoming Seminars

Our presentation is engineered to support K–12 Superintendents and Business Administrators, School Safety and Security Professionals, School District IT Professionals, Higher Education Administrators, and those entrusted with ensuring the safety of school district students, faculty, and staff within your district.

What Schools Must Do to Prepare for a Lockdown or an Active Shooter Event is a workshop designed to assist school leaders in understanding how they can leverage technology to create safer schools inside and out.

In addition to detailing the key elements of school safety ecosystems and the challenges schools face when dealing with active threats, we’ll share insight on how emergency notification solutions, access control systems, video surveillance systems, and multi-line VoIP phone systems can help schools effectively respond to emergencies like active shooter incidents. We’ll share what other districts have done to successfully improve safety within their schools so that attendees can benefit from real-world experiences that others in their field have faced.

We’ll define the 3 principles every emergency notification solution needs to address to be effective in a crisis and why recent legislation and guidelines may fall short of thoroughly preparing schools for a lockdown or active shooter event. Seeing is believing. We’ll provide a live demonstration of Eastern DataComm’s emergency notification system and continuous monitoring service, LENS + OPTICS, to show attendees exactly how technology can and should work in their favor to help avert disaster.

Practical Insight And Interactive Feedback On Active Shooter Response

The workshop will also provide examples that explore the previous active shooter events that made national headlines. Our presenter, Eastern DataComm’s School Safety Advisor, Paul Jenne, will breakdown how these events unfolded and provide practical solutions to address the failure points that led to these tragic outcomes.

We’ll conclude the workshop with a discussion featuring thought leaders in education and technology, along with an audience Q&A. We encourage all of our attendees to come prepared with lots of questions for our team of experts to answer.

In addition to the vital information we shared last year, we’ll be discussing the recent shootings that made headlines, and how a comprehensive system to effectively respond to such events includes technology solutions like emergency notification, phone systems, paging, video surveillance, and access control.

If you attended last year’s seminar, there is certainly more to be learned and new ground to cover. With the content entirely refreshed for a new school year, we’re looking forward to seeing both new and familiar faces in the crowd.

We’ll also tackle some of our most-asked school safety questions we’ve heard from educators across the nation. Some of those queries include:

  • How do we ensure notifications cover the entire property in an urban environment or an open campus environment?
  • What if your campus does not have an overhead intercom system?
  • How can you send an emergency announcement from outside the building?
  • Do all VoIP systems work with e-911?
  • If budget is limited, and a school needs to prioritize which aspects of safety technology they need to upgrade first, where would you recommend they start?
  • Is there a way to monitor an emergency notification system to ensure it is working optimally?

A Workshop That Helps You Prepare For Moments When Every Second Counts

In an active shooter event or other emergency warranting a lockdown or shelter-in-place, every second counts. We firmly believe that when it comes to school safety, we’re all in this together.

That’s why we’re offering this presentation in a variety of locations this fall with more to come in the spring.

Our goal is to help as many schools as possible prevent devastating incidents. Though we cannot stop someone from deciding to perpetrate horrendous acts, we can and will do our best to stop them from doing the damage they intend to inflict.

Connect With Us And Join Us For The Workshop This Fall

We’d love to welcome you to one of our upcoming events. Please be sure to follow us on social media to keep apprised of the latest educational opportunities in your area. You can also check back on our Seminar page to see when and where new locations are added. Our current roster includes:

Thursday, October 6 – Maggiano’s of Hackensack, NJ

Tuesday, October 11 – Hartford, CT Marriott

Wednesday, October 12 – Stamford, CT Marriott

Tuesday, October 18 – Maggiano’s of Cherry Hill, NJ

Wednesday, October 19 – Maggiano’s of Bridgewater, NJ

Ready to explore the best ways to keep your school or district safe this fall before our seminars commence? Contact us here to schedule a Complimentary School Safety Consultation.

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