Enhance Safety Drill Communication and Coordination

Challenges Faced

Bonham Elementary School is part of Abilene ISD, and they needed a way to improve their methods of communicating during their school safety drills and evaluating the results of their drills.

Bonham Elementary School used their PA system, emails, and their fire alarm to initiate safety drills. Staff used colored cards to communicate their statuses to the safety team, and the school did not have an objective way to evaluate the successes and failures of their safety drills.

Proposed Solution

Abilene ISD had been looking at CrisisGo as a means for maintaining two-way safety communication through a platform that could be customized to meet the needs of each school in the district. Bonham Elementary School was particularly interested in improving their school safety drills. By using CrisisGo to also facilitate safety drills, Bonham Elementary School was able to:

• Instantly communicate with staff through a unified safety channel on their mobile devices.
• Facilitate detailed safety drills that can realistically imitate potential emergencies without frightening students.
• Review objective drill data generated by automated post-drill reports.

By using CrisisGo, an AWS Advanced Technology Partner, Bonham Elementary School's platform runs on Amazon Web Services, which ensures the most reliable, secure, and redundant connection possible for school safety needs.

Outcomes

School administrators at Bonham Elementary School were impressed with CrisisGo's ability to directly communicate with all their staff at once. Bonham Elementary Schools' Assistant Principal Kevin Wellborn noted that the Check In tool allowed his staff to report their status during drills much quicker than their previous methods.

According to Wellborn, they performed three safety drills in one session using CrisisGo, and they were able to conduct successful drills in less than 15 minutes.

Wellborn stated, "We have about 530 kids, and we have a special needs program where many of them are not very mobile. We also have two severe behavior classrooms. We were also able to get everyone, including students with special circumstances, outside, back in, and to the safety corridor in 12-13 minutes."