Replies

Here’s an old idea that Parkland and other schools should have had in effect decades ago.

When there was a rash of false fire-alarms pulled within the schools, some schools put cameras up covering the facial area of the person who pulled the alarm. That way a number of students were caught and dealt with.

Let’s take technology a bit further and have every school fire-alarm (the same for libraries, movie theaters, civic centers, etc.) be covered by a hidden camera that shows who is pulling the alarm, but ALSO having an intercom right above the alarm so that the puller CAN TALK TO THE SCHOOL SECURITY PEOPLE AND TELL THEM WHAT THEY SEE GOING ON.

This way at least the school will know who pulled the alarm, and what to look for as a safety threat either inside or outside of the school. Thus is a shooter sets off an alarm in the hopes of getting more targets out into the open (hallways, stairs, front doors, etc). Security People can alert the students/teachers/staff to STAY PUT until the threat is found to be real (i.e. a fire, smoke, gas leak, or shooter).

Then the Administration can decide whether to lockdown every classroom or to evacuate.

While the costs would be significant for large schools, etc., we are not dealing with rocket science. We are dealing with already existing alarm/communications/monitoring systems that just need to be linked up as one unit per spot and connected to a central Security/Safety Office and the Principal’s office.

I assume that every teaching room still has some kind of inter-com system for announcements so all the new systems would have done to them is to link them into the already existing wiring. The same for the fire-alarms in the halls.

We are proposing this to the schools our grandchildren go to. Just hope they have attentive and intelligence leaders in them.