The shootings on campus at Virginia Tech this spring were a wake-up call to many people that educational institutions are still at risk for dangerous events to occur and be exacerbated by lack of efficient communications technologies and policies.
One company that definitely sat up and took notice is Mitel (News - Alert) , provider of IP
telephony and IP presence solutions for the business market. Mitel already offered a variety of solutions that could have application on school campuses to ensure, in the event of an emergency, that appropriate people are notified in a timely manner. But, schools were not necessarily aware of these solutions, so the company decided it was time to highlight how its technology can be used on campus to enhance security and emergency response.
With that in mind, Mitel recently began to more actively market to schools by showing how they can, affordably and in many cases using much of their existing equipment, design and implement effective emergency response systems.
To find out more about how Mitel is helping campuses become safer, TMCnet spoke with the company’s education solutions marketing manager, Vani Naidoo. Naidoo spoke about the capabilities Mitel’s products have, and how the company is putting them together in novel new ways to meet safety needs of schools.
Before delving into Naidoo’s insights, however, it is worth listing Mitel’s core emergency response solutions for school safety and security, designed to help administrators ensure a safe and secure learning environment. These solutions, which are tailored to individual schools’ needs, include:
- Emergency Response Adviser - Enables on and off-campus emergency response by notifying on-site emergency response personnel of emergencies, regardless of location or time of event.
- IP Duress Alarm - Lets staff generate silent alarms to request in-class security assistance.
- IP Paging and Broadcast - Enables messages to be delivered simultaneously to phones and speakers across multiple sites, reducing administrative efforts.
- On Campus Security Call Box - Emergency panic buttons that can be placed around the school campus.
- 5300 HTML Emergency Broadcast - Tools to design customized HTML screen applications capable of interacting directly with student information databases.
- Mass Notification - One call reaches every parent, teacher and staff member within seconds.
- Malicious Call Tagging - Lets staff tag, record and retrieve malicious calls.
- Record-a-Call - Enables the recording, retrieval and archiving of all threatening, incoming calls.
- Emergency Meet Me Conference - Lets staff send critical operating info to school safety officials using Mitel Quick Conference.
The focus with all these solutions is reliability, simplicity and campus-wide coverage. These are needs Naidoo knows firsthand, having spoken with many school administrators to learn how they’re addressing school safety and what tools they are seeking to improve those efforts.
How IP Communications Helps
School administrators today, Naidoo told TMCnet, are increasingly looking into how IP-based solutions can address the safety challenges they face. This is true for both K-12 schools and higher education institutions—even though these types of organizations have different requirements based on size of student body and how big the campus is.
Across the entire education sector, Naidoo said, there is a great deal of concern about school safety. This concern can be heightened by reports like a recent one put out by the U.S. Census Bureau (NCES – National Center for Education Statistics) saying that only 26 percent of all schools in the country have alarm systems in place. (The Report on the Condition of Education, NCES, 2007)
“That’s pretty frightening when you think of it from an emergency perspective,” she said.
The solution to this problem needs to be both hardware and software focused, Naidoo said, and that’s the approach Mitel is taking with its Mitel 3300 IP Communications Platform (ICP) (IP-PBX) and integrated software applications. In fact, she noted that Mitel is moving toward being more of an applications company rather than having the focus be on hardware.
“The value of IP communications is what you can do with it,” Naidoo told TMCnet. “Otherwise, why would you go to IP as opposed to staying with a traditional TDM phone?”
So what can IP communications do for schools? One example is a product Mitel offers called Emergency Response-Adviser. This is a software based solution that provides a dashboard for identifying every phone on a network and enabling targeted emergency notifications.
“Let’s say the phone is in a classroom and the teacher hits the 911 button,” Naidoo explained, using a scenario to illustrate. “That information goes out not only to school administrators but also the public service access point (PSAP); first responders know which school the call has been issued from and where in that school the phone is located.”
In this scenario, when the teacher presses the 911 button on the phone, an alert is sent to the school administrator’s computer, and to security personnel, letting them know there is an urgent situation that needs to be handled. This alert can also be sent to specified wireless phones. Emergency Response-Adviser is based on Mitel’s 3300 IPCommunications Platform (ICP) PBX (News - Alert). Using the PBX as a base, schools can also use ConnexALLsoftware to integrate and monitor all its alarms.
Internal and External
Naidoo told TMCnet that there are two main aspects of emergency response for schools: internal and external. Internal refers to how emergency information is disseminated and reacted to on campus. External refers to how emergency information is communicated to people not located on campus at the time of the incident. This may include non-school emergency responders (police, fire, EMTs, etc.), parents, and other students.
One aspect of external communications during emergencies that’s often overlooked, Naidoo said, is how inquiries from the outside are responded to. In the case of Virginia Tech, for example, the school was flooded with off-campus inquiries from people trying to figure out what was going on. This came in the form of e-mails, instant messages, posts on Facebook and MySpace pages, and phone calls. Knowing how this incoming traffic will be handled is a big part of ensuring that emergencies are dealt with effectively.
Evaluating Infrastructure, Integrating Policies
Emergency response planning, Naidoo told TMCnet, starts by doing an inventory of existing communications and emergency equipment and policies. Once assembled, this information can be used to figure out where there are gaps (for example many schools lack 911 capabilities in the classroom) and how to fix them. Doing this inventory is very important because sometimes the way equipment works and policies are designed can create unforeseen conflicts.
Naidoo used another scenario to illustrate this point: a school has a policy of going into “lockdown” in response to certain types of events. Lockdown means that teachers are to gather all their students together, bring them into a classroom, put them in the middle of the room, and lock the doors. They are then to wait for an all-clear sign before opening the doors again and resuming normal business.
All this sounds well and good, but there’s a problem: what if a fire alarm happens to go off at the same time that lockdown is announced? Fire alarm systems are designed so that, if there’s a fire, all locks are automatically released to make sure everyone can get out of the building safely. Obviously, this in conflict with the actions related to lockdown.
This scenario illustrates the necessity of planning. Naidoo said that a school might have all the appropriate technology solutions in place (lockdown, IP paging and broadcast, Emergency Response-Adviser, etc.) but those solutions by themselves will not necessarily solve requirements for ensuring safety on campus.
“They need to have a plan first,” she told TMCnet.
Changing Times, Changing Requirements
One reason why school administrators are so concerned about campus safety is an increasing awareness that the nature of emergency situations is changing, and as a result the technology and policies needed are changing, too. Naidoo said that she’s spoken with many school administrators who are concerned because they don’t have a way to send alerts to everyone who needs to get them, or because their systems aren’t sophisticated enough to make sure that information is disseminated in an appropriate way.
For example, a school may need to send pages or broadcasts to only certain areas of a campus, to ensure that a shooter on the loose doesn’t find out that the school is trying to direct people away from the area where he or she is located.
“A lot of schools don’t have the systems in place, because we never had these types of situations happen before,” Naidoo said. “It’s only in the past 10-15 years that this kind of thing has started happening,” she added, referring to school shootings like the one this spring at Virginia Tech.
Many schools have only fire alarm systems and an intercom in place, and nothing else—no way to respond appropriately to other types of emergencies.
Luckily, the awareness of this problem is resulting in appropriate action. School administrators are revamping their emergency response plans; Federal, state and local governments are developing grants to help schools get funds needed to install more sophisticated communications systems.
Work With What You Have
Mitel is also taking a proactive approach to the problem of school safety. In large part, this means helping schools work with the communications technology investments they’ve already made, perhaps adding a few new applications, to make the campus safer. All of the company’s systems are interoperable with products from other vendors, giving schools flexibility to build a solution that works best for them and that doesn’t break the bank.
“On the K-12 side, schools just don’t have the funding to do a rip-and-replace for a completely new IP system,” Naidoo noted. “One of the benefits of a Mitel system is that we do integrate with TDM equipment, so the school can gradually implement an IP system over time as they get funding to do that.”
K-12 vs. Higher Education
Of course, the emergency response budgets and needs of schools in the K-12 sector differs somewhat from their higher education counterparts. Naidoo said a lot of this has to do with the mobility of the student body. On a K-12 campus, the majority of students can be located relatively easily. This means that, rather than making sure all students know an emergency situation is occurring, the focus is on getting the message out to parents.
This is very different from a college or university campus, where students are highly mobile; they may be scattered all across campus, or even be off campus and moving toward a danger zone unaware. In the case of Virginia Tech, for example, the school had to communicate information to students both on and off-campus, as well as to faculty and staff. They also had to figure out how to alert people in the building where the shooter was located, as well as people not in the building to make sure they knew to stay away.
“Getting information to people who are mobile is a lot more difficult than getting information to people who are in a static location,” Naidoo pointed out.
There is also the problem on a higher education campus of student and faculty behavior. The school may blast out an emergency message to all phones on the campus, but that doesn’t mean the information will be received.
“The majority of faculty don’t actually answer their phones,” Naidoo said. “If they’re in their office, they’ll send it to voicemail.” This was cited in a 2006 study of Florida universities (“Final Report of Emergency Communication Systems for Florida University and Community College Campuses,” Dr. L. Wei and Dr. J. Pearson, University of Central Florida, [email protected], [email protected], February 23, 2006).
So, maybe the school will decide that e-mail is a better way to disseminate information. Wrong again. Faculty also tend not to check their e-mail on a regular basis; students may, but are much more likely to be checking text messages on their mobile phones.
“The form in which you want to communicate is very different than on the K-12 side,” Naidoo said. “A lot of schools are trying to figure out how to send SMS messages.”
Naidoo added that higher education institutions don’t have access to grants for funding new emergency response systems; instead they must find money in their existing budgets or rely on private contributions.
Mitel’s Approach
Mitel is now, as mentioned earlier, working more closely with school administrators to raise awareness about how its IP telephony and IP presence solutions can be used to enhance campus safety. While the company is primarily putting existing products to new uses, it also develops tailor-made systems out of its building blocks, to meet the specific requirements that a school may have.
Planning, of course, is vital to successfully enhancing campus safety. This means performing an inventory of existing infrastructure, reviewing policies, and ensuring that all appropriate people are included in the planning process.
“It’s key to work closely with the emergency preparedness personnel on campus,” Naidoo said.
For higher education institutions, emergency preparedness personnel includes IT and telecom staff, as well as security. On the K-12 side, the school district administrator, safety administrator, director of school safety and security, and CIO need to be included in the process.
Some of the emergency scenarios that Mitel is addressing as it helps schools develop their systems include:
- Making sure that deaf/hard-of-hearing people are alerted to an emergency
- Enabling teachers to send silent emergency messages from their screen phones, as well as receive discrete text messages
- Sending emergency broadcasts to specific classrooms or areas of a campus
- Enabling school administrators to listen in on the activity in a particular classroom
- Sending out mass notifications (emergency or not) to parents, and giving parents the ability to specify where they want to be contacted
- Enabling school administrators to send messages in real-time and be alerted which parents received the info and which did not
Ultimately, Mitel’s goal is to make the lives of school administrators easier as they work to ensure campus safety.
“At the end of the day, what they are trying to do is prevent anyone from getting hurt,” Naidoo noted.
To learn more about Mitel’s IP telephony and IP presence solutions, both for businesses and for schools, please visit the company’s TMCnet.com channels, IP Telephony and IP Presence.
Mae Kowalke previously wrote for Cleveland Magazine in Ohio and The Burlington Free Press in Vermont. To see more of her articles, please visit Mae Kowalke’s columnist page. Also check out her Wireless Mobility blog.
Private Branch Exchange (PBX) | X |
| Originally, telephone features were provided by telephone central office switching systems, often called CENTREX.�PBX systems emerged as customers wanted to have more calling features and control over...more |
Internet Protocol (IP) | X |
| IP stands for Internet Protocol, a data-networking protocol developed throughout the 1980s. It is the established standard protocol for transmitting and receiving data
in packets over the Internet. I...more |
Time Division Multiplexing (TDM) | X |
| TDM divides transmission channels into time-separated channels. TDM was designed to provide each channel with a fixed amount of bandwidth. The tutorial explains more....more |
Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) | X |
| HTML is a text and graphic editing system like a word processor or markup (to change) language (program). The key to HTML are hyper-text links which are connections to other computer programs, conten...more |
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