School safetyAlabama safe school technology tests may keep children safer

Published 12 October 2018

Safety and security technology tests underway at a Jackson County, Alabama school could help keep Alabama’s schoolchildren safer if implemented statewide. Rather than developing an emergency response to an active shooter incident, the project focuses on expanding the perimeter of protection to help ensure interception of a potential shooter. Components of the system also provide law enforcement with enhanced situational information.

Safety and security technology tests underway at a Jackson County school in collaboration with The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) Systems Management and Production (SMAP) Center could help keep Alabama’s schoolchildren safer if implemented statewide.

The technology test bed at Skyline High School is a cooperative effort between the Jackson County Board of Education, Jackson County Sheriff’s Dept. and UAH.

“On the State of Alabama level, we are working with the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency (ALEA),” says Dr. Gary Maddux, SMAP director. “We will also be working with the local municipal police officers of the various towns within Jackson County.”

UAH says that the effort is an evolution of SMAP involvement in Jackson County schools security that began following the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings in Connecticut and was spurred again by the Parkland, Fla., school shootings.

“After Parkland in February, we wanted to revisit our efforts. However, we changed our approach from one of planning to one of preventing,” says Dr. Maddux, who is a Skyline alumnus.

Rather than developing an emergency response to an active shooter incident, the project focuses on expanding the perimeter of protection to help ensure interception of a potential shooter, he says. Components of the system also provide law enforcement with enhanced situational information.

Cameras linked directly to the cell phones of Jackson County sheriff’s deputies will provide valuable advance information in an emergency scenario, says Sheriff Chuck Phillips. “We can go on our cell phones and turn them on and off as we please and look and see what going on, and it also has audio so we can hear what’s going on,” Sheriff Phillips says.

“If you have an active shooter, somebody might be able to see him on the camera and go to where he’s at,” he says. “Or, if you’ve got children in a room and you don’t know exactly where they’re at, you can locate them by camera, and that’ll be valuable information to someone who is working a case like that.”