The Role of Technology in School Safety

April 3, 2023
Blog

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Across the entire school safety spectrum, technology has played a significant role in enhancing school safety, especially in recent years. Coordinating this technology successfully requires looking at the big picture of your school safety and security ecosystem. Getting your existing systems to communicate with each other can better streamline your school safety initiatives—and budget.

Let’s look at school safety and security technology through the lens of Prevent, Prepare, Respond, and Recover, and how Raptor Connect can streamline your safety and security processes.

About Raptor Connect
The Raptor Connect integration platform—an advanced technology that enables Raptor and other components of your safety ecosystem to talk to one another—enables native, bi-directional integration with a school’s existing digital security systems and peripherals.

Prevent

Student Wellbeing and Mental Health

Early intervention is the most important and effective way to support a student who may be experiencing challenges they are not equipped to manage. Being able to recognize a student in the initial stages of distress empowers schools to reduce that child’s exposure and give them the support they need to cope and heal.

Raptor’s patented StudentSafe technology brings together the systems that help schools recognize, document, support and manage the wellbeing of individual students. The intuitive and robust platform includes safeguarding and behavioral threat assessment (BTA) methodologies which are proven to help schools recognize a student in need of early intervention and support for their wellbeing.

Prepare

Surveillance and Physical Security Systems:

High-tech surveillance systems, such as security cameras, can monitor activity within the school and provide a valuable resource for law enforcement in the event of an emergency.

When partnered with an AI system like ZeroEyes or Omnilert for AI gun detection—which can integrate with Raptor to automatically initiate a school’s emergency response protocol—these systems can provide sub-second detection of potential active shooter gun threats.

Further, safety features such as remote-locking doors and even smartboards can be integrated into your Raptor ecosystem through Raptor Connect, improving your school’s ability to respond quickly and communicate readily in the event of an emergency.

Practice drills using the same technology

Drills should test your school’s existing procedures and policies—and use the same technology you’ll use in a real emergency. This enables your school community to create muscle memories that increase response efficiency. It also means you can analyze your procedures and technology for weaknesses to see where you need to improve performance.

Raptor Emergency Manager enables schools to manage and track drills as well as review reports on drill performance so your district can learn and improve as well as eliminate compliance risks.

Respond

Emergency Response Systems:

Emergency response systems, such as Raptor Alert, can quickly alert authorities to an emergency, allowing for a rapid response.

Further, app-based solutions—unlike hardware such as panic badges which require a proprietary mesh network—connects from any hardwired, cellular, or wireless network empowering staff to initiate a response to any type of emergency, talk directly to 911 operators, and provide critical details. Because the alert uses mobile app technology, it allows for two-way chat communication during an emergency, giving staff and emergency responders real-time updates for additional context and details to help keep students safe.

Raptor Alert also directly integrates with your SIS data and closest 911 PSAP and can include CRG maps—putting critical information in the hands of first responders and school personnel simultaneously.

Recover

Accountability:

Raptor Emergency Management is also connected to your student information system, enabling you to quickly and easily account for students and staff, providing emergency responders with critical information.

And, when paired with our robust Visitor Management system, administrators and emergency responders can also be updated with the location of visitors in the event of an emergency, such as a lockdown, fire, or earthquake.

Reunification:

Minimizing trauma is directly correlated to a safe, efficient reunification—so having a system like Raptor that integrates with your student information system is critical to reducing chaos and allowing you to confidently release students to approved guardians.

Streamline your school safety ecosystem with Raptor

Raptor has created a strong community of partners and is fully integrated into one platform, eliminating the need for multiple systems. This ecosystem of school safety leaders covers a wide range of peripherals, including cameras, gun detection, fire/smoke detection, alarms, speakers, IoT devices, smart boards, access control, communication devices, and more.

To see how Raptor Connect streamlines emergency preparedness and response, contact us today.