Safer Watch school safety program lauded
STEUBENVILLE — Jefferson County 9-1-1 Director Rob Herrington says implementation of the Safer Watch school safety program has been nearly flawless.
The state-of-the-art school security system is built around the SaferWatch app, a communications network that links a network of cameras to the 9-1-1 hub so dispatchers can tap into the video feed and, in the event of an emergency, instantly notify first responders and administrators.
He said every school in Jefferson County is now participating in SaferWatch, protecting about 9,500 students countywide.
The system was implemented in partnership with OME-RESA. Jefferson County commissioners covered the one-time licensing fees, which totaled more than $331,000.
“We implemented everything at the beginning of the school year,” Herrington said. “Teachers and administrators have the app running on their phones, so they can do the notifications from their phones. And then in December, we finally (started receiving) fobs that they can wear around their neck, they’re like a panic button … the button links to their phone (which has the app installed) and allows them to just carry (it) to do an emergency activation.”
The school camera feed would go live only if the dispatch center gets an emergency alert or a fire alarm would sound.
Beyond that, he said they’re meeting regularly with law enforcement to “refine and revise” the response process — looking at the what-ifs and planning their response.
“There’s a lot of planning that’s going on, it has been going on really since last summer, for all the support functions that have to take place to be prepared as much as we possibly could be,” he said. “The next thing that we’ll be doing is updating floor plans, and making sure that the cameras correspond to the floor plan so that we can know what we’re looking at — you can’t put the cameras up and know you’re going to figure out what you’re looking at, the cameras (have to be) mapped back to the floor plans of the building. That’s really very time consuming.”
Herrington said they also put a system in place so in an emergency, they can relay the video directly to first responders. They’re also having an app developed “so when they get to the scene, all they have to do is open the app … on their phones, their iPads, whatever devices they use.”
“It has to be instantaneous, they can’t open up a web browser on a phone and try to do it that way,” he said. “It has to be kind of a push button thing, so we came up with the idea in the fall and we contracted with an app developer.”
He said Sheriff Fred Abdalla Jr. and some of the police departments have been out in the community promoting ALICE (Alert, Lockdown, Inform, Counter, Evacuate) Training and Stop The Bleed. ALICE Training deals in part with what to actually do in case of a violent event in school, while Stop the Bleed a trauma-type presentation for teachers and students, “it tells them what to do in case someone is gravely injured.”
“We get the group together every couple months to update where we’re at, find out if they’ve found anything about a particular school or program that we need to share,” he said. “And out of that meeting another thing we’re working on, we’re preparing a grant application for it, is we need every police officer assigned to respond to be able to get into the school. Some schools have key cards, some schools have keys, physical keys, there’s all kinds of different ways so we’re working with a company that specializes in (solutions )… so all officers will have access because we don’t know who will get there first and we can’t have a delay in accessing a building if there is a (problem).”
He said community buy-in has been crucial to the program’s development and is unique to Jefferson County.
“Our level of cooperation is different,” he said. “Getting all the schools to do SaferWatch, getting commissioners to commit to funding the licenses, getting law enforcement when they’re busy with so many other things to commit to this training … if you don’t have everybody committed to doing it, it (doesn’t happen). We were able to facilitate it but it wouldn’t have worked if everybody else didn’t buy in.”
