DENVER — As school districts look for ways to keep their classrooms safe for students and staff, many are turning to technology.

Denver Public Schools (DPS) has launched the first phase of CrisisGo to help the district improve communication during its emergency response. The company provides schools with advanced alerting software and other tools to streamline a school district’s response to incidents.

Kip Sixbery, emergency manager for DPS, sees the benefits of staying current by implementing technology in his department.

“After every critical incident in the district, we do a debriefing with the school. We want a school lens view of how that critical incident unfolded, how it was processed and how we handled it as a safety department,” Sixbery said.

Sixbery noted that communication was the number one issue in debriefing after a critical incident. Schools wanted better communication and access to information during an incident, not just before and after.

“If you think about the life cycle of a lock or a secure perimeter, it could be just a few minutes or it could be hours. Now imagine that you are a teacher or student inside a classroom and that you have been communicated from the beginning. of an incident and then not again until the end,” Sixbery said.

Before CrisisGo, staff and students did not have a secure way to communicate effectively with school safety officers. In addition, the DPS dispatch center had to individually notify every surrounding school and department within 1.5 miles of the incident.

Denver Public Schools is adding new technology to improve communication during school crisis responses

Anyone with access to CrisisGo can immediately send an alert to all members of the school community with the push of a button, speeding up response times. Mobile devices will play a loud notification before going silent after 20 seconds.

“Once the incident started, there was a lot of commotion in the building. We have PA announcements going through. We have the CrisisGo app (which actually makes us make significant noise at the onset of an incident). But after that, I move everything. Everything is quiet,” Sixbery said.

When an alert is received, each CrisisGo member can use the app or click a link to begin messaging school safety officers, students, staff and parents.

In an emergency, Sixbery said this method will help first responders focus on allocating resources and provide some relief to those involved in the incident.

“For these incidents in the district, being able to gather information from as many sources as possible is critical to the efficiency and how we operate through that incident,” Sixbery said. “With that two-way communication feature, the people involved in the incident, the people blocking the building, can give us direct knowledge of what’s going on in that building. And that makes it easier for us to allocate resources to a particular part. of the building”.

In the first phase of this rollout, only school staff will have access to the CrisisGo app. DPS plans to add students and parents in the future.