The Journey Toward Improving Emergency Preparedness: Featuring The Wellington School

By Stephanie Osorno, Marketing Copywriter at Alertus Technologies

What’s the key to properly preparing your organization for any emergency? The Wellington School knows first-hand what it means to take a proactive stance on emergency preparedness. 

In this blog, we feature John Kruzan, Director of Technology at The Wellington School, who talks to us about how implementing a more comprehensive mass notification solution has helped his school to make a wide range of emergency notification improvements and expansions. 

Name: John Kruzan
Title: Director of Technology 
School: The Wellington School

What challenges were you initially facing that led Wellington to consider an emergency mass notification system?

It started with our nursing unit. We have emergency treatment rooms in the school where our nurse takes care of students. Her nursing unit is sort of in a portion of the hallway that has a small amount of traffic going by, but it’s not really adjacent to a high-traffic area. So if she was in the treatment room where a student was experiencing a critical emergency like a bleed or something and she needed to call for help while still maintaining contact with him or her, there was no way to do that. We started by searching for a basic panic button that we could place in the treatment room. 

What made you and your team at Wellington choose Alertus Technologies for your emergency notification needs?

I remembered seeing a demonstration of how the Alertus System manages all sorts of emergency notifications. I told our facility director, who I work closely with, that we should explore a system like Alertus instead of one that’s targeted to a single location. 

The thing that I like about the Alertus System is that we can customize who gets the notification,  which you can’t do with a panic-only system.

What products did you end up purchasing from Alertus, and how did they help to solve the initial challenge you were trying to solve for the nursing unit?

We went ahead and installed an Alertus activation button on the wall of our nursing treatment room, as well as an Alert Beacon® outside of the nursing suite in the hallway.

With the activation button, if the nurse was holding on to a student who was bleeding or in a serious condition, she could just reach over and push the button with her elbow.

What kind of effect did installing the Alertus activation button and the Alert Beacon have on Wellington’s emergency preparedness? 

Installing the wall-mounted activation button and the Alert Beacon was a great way for our facility workers and other decision-makers to see how flexible the Alertus System is. I also learned a lot through the installation and configuration process. 

At that point, we started to think about how we could get the maximum amount of value out of the Alertus System. We started out by implementing the Alertus Desktop™ Notification, the Alertus Activator App, and the Alertus Recipient App—we began to shift to that as our primary method of emergency notification. We trained the entire faculty to use the Alertus Activator App to initiate an alert. The best thing was that we began teaching them that this mobile activator was their version of a fire alarm pull. If an emergency is happening, they now have that immediate decision making in their hands.

What was your emergency notification process like before implementing the Alertus System?

We had been using an overhead paging system and a third-party texting system. So before, during an emergency situation, we still needed someone to get on the paging system to explain what was going on if faculty or students were not in front of their desktops or phones. We wanted one single point of activation, so we began to view the Alertus System as our integrator. This is what pulled our various emergency notification systems together. We went ahead and installed Alert Beacons in all public places in the building. We also added the Alertus Text To-Speech Interface for our paging system so that there was no need for live voice alerting.

What are some of the benefits of integrating your existing communication system with the Alertus System?

When we first started trying to find a solution for the nursing unit, we were thinking of one specific emergency notification problem. Now, we think in terms of overall system-wide integration as opposed to a simple alerting system that solves one problem. I think that’s a nice paradigm shift in the way we think about mass notification.

The paging system with the text-to-speech interface has made such a tremendous difference. The pages can be heard everywhere. And if you’re in the building and you cannot hear the page, you also have the Alert Beacons, the desktop computers, and the mobile app alerts letting you know what’s going on. We look at it as a multitier alerting system now. It’s almost impossible to avoid an emergency notification. 

We are also using the Alertus System to automatically lock exterior doors and for tornado drills. 

Do you have any advice to share for other schools or organizations that are looking to improve their emergency preparedness?

In an emergency, the more things you have to do, the less likely you will do all of them correctly. With the Alertus System, we now have one thing to do during an emergency: initiate an alert that is sent to the entire system. The humans are no longer responsible for having to keep their heads in the game long enough to activate an alert for door lockdown, an overhead page, etc. Their job now is to help other humans get safe. 

If you have a complicated emergency notification system, replacing it with just one single system is huge. It has changed the way we think about those first  20-30 seconds during an emergency.

You can read the full Wellington School case study with John here.

Be sure to visit the Alertus Resources to learn how you or your organization can better facilitate emergency management.