By Anna Mefford
Perhaps you’ve noticed a strange, new box on the ceiling of one of your classrooms? Or that your teacher has an extra card hanging from their ID lanyard?
Both are part of the new Centegix system that Lovett recently adopted to create a safer environment. Centegix is a crisis management system used for critical incidents, which Mr. Boswell states that he “hopes we never have to use.”
Head of Security, Mr. Ablan, explained how Lovett has been looking into this type of technology for the past year due to national incidents at schools that have put students’ lives and safety at risk.
After looking at 3 different companies, the security team decided on Centegix due to its ease of use. Each faculty and staff member was issued a white badge with a button. They push the button three times if they need help. For more serious cases, the faculty member would push the button 8 or more times to lock down the school for any kind of extreme incident.
Once the button is pushed 8 times, the strobes all around the school will flash red, signaling a lockdown event, and faculty desktops will have a message on them telling everybody this is a lockdown with some instructions.
Centegix did not require much training, as faculty just had to know how many times to click the button. However, there is a smaller group of faculty who are “responders.”
“Lovett has a vast number of responders across the whole campus that we thoughtfully considered who would be where, and they’re assigned to a certain area,” Mr. Ablan said.
For example, in the lower school, there are a certain number of responders, and they have an app on their phone. So, let’s just say someone was choking and needed help, and a faculty member pushed the button three times. The responders would then get an alert on their phone, on the app, and a layout of the school campus would come up on their phone.
“The way it really works is that there are locating beacons all around the school. When you push the button, it picks up the located beacon closest to where you are, or whoever picks up the signal, and then that sends all that information to the app. And then we open up the app and we look at the drawing, the diagram on the phone, which would be through the app, and then we know where you are,” Mr. Ablan said.
Security broke down the campus into four areas with designated responders who are assigned to that area. But security and the nurses, on the other hand, get every single call, “so we know what’s going on all over the campus,” Mr. Ablan says.
Lovett is one of the leading private schools to adopt this new technology, however many are beginning to follow suit.
Currently, the security department is trying to “educate staff, faculty, and students on not letting people in the building, especially if you don’t know them, and also stop propping doors open.” These are all massive security risks and put the whole school in danger.
After interviewing Mr. Ablan, I talked to Mr. Boswell, who shed light on an administrator’s (and responder’s) perspective of Centegix.
As head of the upper school, he explained how he was not very involved in the process of deciding on Centegix, however, he was highly supportive of it.
Faculty and staff received training that helped them understand how to use the software, what it meant, and what it looked like. They all practiced clicking the buttons so they knew what it felt like (it vibrates). “I’m unique in that if I did it, my computer would light up and show me that I was doing it, but a teacher is not a responder. And so they would click it and essentially be sort of silent,” he said.
The only concern Mr. Boswell has about Centegix is the possibility of false alarms. However, he said it is honestly good practice for responders when the faculty accidentally clicks the button. ”Blood pressure goes up, and we respond,” he said. “It’s not a big deal. We know that you have a system like this; you’re going to have some false alarms, and yes, a false lockdown would be a traumatic experience here. That is the concern, but I also think the chances of that happening are really slim.”
The reality with such a large campus is that Centgix will be used for the alerts. “I think that’s awesome, and I hope it continues to allow us to respond to those even more quickly and more effectively than we did before,” Mr. Boswell said.
After 2 weeks of having Centegix, faculty and staff have all sorts of mixed feelings. Evidently, this is a good thing to have. There’s no doubt about it. However, it’s just “a constant reminder of the world that we live in. None of us chose this profession because we want to be in dangerous situations,” Mr. Boswell said.. “We know that keeping kids safe is part of our job here, but we also didn’t sign on for military style operations.”
Already, there have been two incidents involving the use of Centegix. “We got there faster,” Mr. Boswell explained. “We knew what to do, who we were going to see when we got there, and we also knew that backup was coming.”
