— VillageSafety —
To create safer schools through enhanced communication and collaboration between students, faculty, and families, stopping incidents before they happen, and to facilitate rapid response and command during those critical first few minutes of an incident.
School safety is a Village affair!!
Our App provides a school safety program to support our mission.
Understanding the mechanism of the spread of COVID-19 and best practices for managing the pandemic has been a moving target with mixed and frequently changing information from the CDC and other agencies charged with safeguarding the health of the country. At SchoolVillage we track the current state of research and recommendations and make the publications and sources available within the app.
Flexibility in the scheduling of classes is one of the keys to reopening schools in the COVID environment, and there is a possibility that the pandemic may have permanent effects on how classes are conducted.
The physical isolation of individuals and families that COVID has mandated has created a need for more fluid digital communications to conduct the business of life and to maintain a sense of community. People are social beings, and isolation can have both emotional and mental health implications. The pandemic has brought economic stress to many families, further complicating the mental health picture.
While schools cannot solve all of these problems, they will be manifested in numerous ways that will impact the educational mission. And schools will have to deal with that. The SchoolVillage app provides a suite of tools to support this effort and to build community involvement.
A quick and decisive response to an incident with the right responders can make all the difference in the outcome.
Teachers need systems that provide immediate and appropriate assistance when things go wrong.
Our Incident Alert Function allows teachers to identify their emergency, send a request for immediate response, and transmit their location in less than 10 seconds.
can be sent by the teacher to provide more detail to on-campus responders, and the responders can call or text back.
Student enters text message describing the safety issue. If desired they can attach photos or videos.
The text message is immediately transmitted to the designated admin staff for Action.
A record is created in the Anonymous Hotline Log for future reference and for noting the follow up steps taken and resolution of the issue.
In an emergency, one of the most difficult issues is the effective coordination of the efforts of first responders and campus staff, and clear direction to occupants.
The SchoolVillage app provides a shared platform, accessible (at appropriate levels) to first responders, security, admin and teaching staff, students, and family. It allows continuous interactive communications among all responders and access to campus maps, Standard Operating Protocols (customized by type of incident), and the ability for Incident Command to send large group text messages to campus occupants giving direction or status updates.
The dashboard interface is intuitive, eliminating the need to train first responders in the use of the system.
The SchoolVillage App creates a record of communications over the course of an incident, which is useful for post-incident analysis and can reduce School District legal liability.
by identifying students that are dealing with psycho/emotional issues and getting them connected with the appropriate intervention before bad things happen.
No one would argue that an active Threat Assessment program is better than dealing with the consequences of school violence, but that requires time and resources.
is used to send safety incident related messages to large groups within the school including administrative staff, faculty, students and family.
The Safety Document Access System allows users to open docs from our app specific to their school including:
Teachers shouldn't have to memorize emergency procedure manuals and they can't carry a copy in their pockets ... or can they?
for quick access to critical information:
The App provides a secure multi-media group talk-around platform for discreet communications among security and admin staff.
Users can transmit text messages, voice messages, photos and video. All Messaging is tracked and becomes a part of the Daily Security Report,and can be sorted and filtered as a part of regular data analytics.
You can create custom groups for after-school groups, a group for the band, sports teams, theatrical groups, field trips, fraternities, sororities, etc.
Group's can be one-way — group-leader to group, or two-way by granting members privileges to message groups.
Now, more than ever, communication is more challenging and necessary. Students and their families are direct beneficiaries of this improved communication system.
New students in finding classrooms
— AND —
Parents on back to school night
… it took 25 minutes to take a Roll Call for a remote learning class! Anonymous teacher
Monitor and Analyze Critical Security Procedures
Security communications and events are tracked and recorded throughout each day via the SchoolVillage App. The tracked data is aggregated in chronological order and automatically assembled and distributed in a Daily Security Report.
Data communications in the report include: Safety Alerts, Anonymous Hotline Messages, Broadcast Safety Messages, Incident Reports, Talk-Around Group Messaging and Follow-Up Comments. The chronological order of these communications is particularly useful in understanding the sequence of multiple related communications.
Daily Security Report is automatically distributed to designated recipients via email.
With this information, Administrative and Security staff can deploy resources where they can be most effective and predict situations that have more risk of incidents.
Post-incident analysis of system-generated Messaging, Alerts, Reports, and Notifications provides a platform for troubleshooting and improving incident response protocols.
Administrative staff can filter data based on selected criteria. Customized pre-formatted reports can be created by SchoolVillage to meet the specific needs of your educational organization.
In 2011, Michael Wiggins, CEO of SchoolVillage, was managing the construction of a large inner-city medical facility in the Los Angeles area. As part of a community outreach initiative, local high school students were offered Construction Engineer internships at the medical facility site and other local projects to introduce them to opportunities in the industry. In conjunction with the internships, an ACE (architecture, construction, and engineering) Mentor after-school program was established at a local high school to provide more extensive, structured education on the design and management of building construction. Michael has been the Team Leader of this ACE program for the last 8 years. Students from the first years of the program are now returning as mentors to the current generation of high school students and “paying it forward” after receiving Construction Management and Civil Engineering degrees.
As the ACE program developed it was apparent that faculty and students at the high school were faced with many non-academic challenges, not the least of which was personal safety. Our team recognized that some of the mobile software that had been developed for the construction industry had nearly identical process improvement objectives to the needs in school safety: 1) Continuous safety improvement 2) Rapid response to incidents 3) Enhanced communications. 4) Thorough documentation of events. 5) Data platform for post-incident analysis. We felt that we were uniquely suited to understand the issues and provide functional solutions.
Most of the media coverage of school safety focuses on active-shooter incidents and the police/emergency services response to those incidents. While emergency response is an essential element in mitigating consequences of this type of event there are other factors that affect incident outcomes and the overall safety environment in schools.
A) Rapid and organized response to an incident in the first 10 minutes (before Police arrive) can have a big impact on the outcome. B) Police and Emergency Services have well-organized command and control systems for managing an incident but may not have reliable systems for communicating with and directing students, faculty, and families. C) Most schools have nearly daily safety events that don't rise to the level of an active-shooter event but never-the-less have significant impacts on individuals involved and on the learning environment in the school. Documentation and analysis of these events and continuous adaptation of safety systems to address identified trends are critical to the improvement of safety. D) Systems that encourage student and community involvement in the safety of the schools are vital to avoiding incidents, a much better alternative than dealing with the consequences of incidents.
Addressing these factors is the foundation of the SchoolVillage Mobile Platform. We know a lot about the issues facing schools and we know a lot about technology, but we recognize that we don't know it all, so.....we are very good listeners. Bring us your problems and we will bring you solutions.
It Takes a Village to keep our Children Safe!
Michael Wiggins began his working career in Construction Management and has managed the construction of a wide variety of projects including public schools, courthouses, police departments, hospitals, and corporate campuses, all of which have their own unique set of security requirements. He has been an industry leader in the development of “Lean” (efficient) process improvements, including the creation and implementation of new mobile applications. While continuing to work in the construction industry Michael became a volunteer Paramedic and Firefighter, participating in back-country search and rescue operations, medical emergency responses and structure fire responses.
Mr. Wiggins was instrumental in designing and implementing response protocols and training exercises for multiple casualty incidents and in establishing a CISD (Critical Incident Stress Debriefing) Team. He has worked as a paramedic in 911 systems in Denver and San Diego, participating as a first responder in a number of multiple-casualty and active-shooter incidents. Michael has gained additional insight into the daily safety challenges that schools face through his volunteer work as a Team Leader for the past 8 years with the ACE (architecture, construction, engineering) Mentor Program, an after-school program which introduces high school students to building design and construction management.
