Panic buttons and phone alerts: How technology helped prevent further bloodshed at Apalachee

(CNN) — Apalachee High School teacher Stephen Kreyenbuhl knew something was wrong Wednesday before he heard gunshots.

The social studies teacher told CNN he was in the middle of a lesson when his smartboard alerted that the school was in a “hard lockdown.”

“In that instance, I knew something emergency-wise was about to happen,” Kreyenbuhl said. “I got everybody into a corner, turned off the lights, and just kind of held everyone nice and tight and just said, ‘Wait for everything to happen, everything to pass.’”

Kreyenbuhl said the school’s new alert system bought him critical time to prepare and protect his students before a shooter opened fire just down the hall from their classroom.

“I was so happy to hear the voice of our (school resource officer) outside the hallway within about two minutes of the gunfire,” he said.

The CrisisAlert system, designed by Centegix, includes a device the size of an ID badge. It’s equipped with a button that, when pressed rapidly, can quietly notify administrators and local law enforcement to the exact location of an active emergency.

The company works with school districts and law enforcement agencies to integrate the system into their current safety procedures and automate as much as possible.

Barrow County Sheriff Jud Smith told CNN Apalachee High School had the system for less than a week and had tested it for the first time only the day before the shooting.

He called the timing, “God’s intervention.”

Two students and two teachers were killed during the shooting Wednesday and nine others were injured. As the nation reels from yet another deadly school shooting – the 45th in the country so far this year – experts and law enforcement officials say this latest tragedy underscores the role technology can play in helping to reduce police response time and potentially prevent further bloodshed.

When seconds can save lives

In a statement posted to social media Thursday, the Barrow County Fire Department said it received the first alert through the Centegix system at 10:22 a.m.

The county’s Battalion 1 unit arrived on scene 8 minutes later, and emergency rescue services entered the school by 10:34 a.m.

“By 10:52 a.m., all critically injured patients had been evacuated from the scene – just 30 minutes from the first alert,” the department said in the satement.

When reached by email Thursday, a spokesperson for Centegix told CNN the company is “saddened to hear of the events at Apalachee High School” but declined to comment further.

Brent Cobb, the company’s CEO, told CNN in an interview earlier this year that their CrisisAlert technology was designed following the 2018 Parkland high school shooting in Florida to give teachers and administrators a fast and discreet way to call for help.

“Time equals lives,” he said. “And you need everyone to know immediately” that a crisis is taking place.

Once a lockdown is activated, the CrisisAlert system is designed to trigger a series of responses: Pre-recorded warnings sound over the intercom system to alert the entire campus to the lockdown, while on-site safety administrators, like school resource officers, are notified of the location of the incident.

Cobb told CNN in some school districts the system is also integrated with local law enforcement agencies and can automatically call 911 and send messages to officers of the exact location of the incident. This is what happened in Barrow County.

The goal, he said, is to help decrease police response times, an issue that has come under scrutiny in recent years following the shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, where it took officers 77 minutes to adequately respond to a shooter.

In an exclusive interview with CNN Thursday, Smith scrolled through the series of alerts and the detailed map his officers received to guide them to where the shooting was happening. He also praised the “unbelievable” school resource officers who confronted the shooter and took him into custody.

“A school resource officer, in most cases, don’t know that they’re going to make it out,” he said. “They know going in that either my life is going to be taken … for a school resource officer this is the pinnacle of what they don’t want. This is what we train for.”

‘Alyssa’s Law’ and cutting police response times

In the years since her daughter Alyssa was killed during the Parkland shooting, Lori Alhadeff has channeled her grief into pushing for legislative action.

Her organization, Make our Schools Safe, lobbies state legislatures to pass “Alyssa’s Law,” which would require school districts to install silent alert systems directly linked to law enforcement agencies. Seven states, including Florida, New Jersey and Tennessee, have enacted the law in recent years.

Last year Georgia introduced similar legislation.

“My heart goes out to the families that had someone killed yesterday. I know their pain, unfortunately,” Alhadeff told CNN Thursday, adding that she and other advocates will now be able to cite the use of panic buttons in the Apalachee shooting as they urge lawmakers to pass Alyssa’s Law.

“This technology is something that helps to mitigate loss of life, and it did yesterday in Apalachee High School,” she said.

Emergency alert systems have evolved rapidly since the 2007 shooting at Virginia Tech, when the university officials came under fire for failing to immediately notify students or take safety precautions during the shooting spree, which killed 32 people.

“When we look at the data that we do have on mass shootings, we know that these tragedies are over very, very quickly,” said Jaclyn Schildkraut, executive director of the Rockerfeller Institute’s Regional Gun Violence Research Consortium.

“And so it’s about, what can we do to put more time on the clock… the sooner that you can notify people, the better you are, because you’re giving them that time to not only put the clock on their side, but to put the distance on their side.”

But she also cautioned the technology should not be treated as a panacea or as a substitute for safety training like lockdown drills.

“It’s about thinking through these plans ahead of time, and then training your body and training your mind to know what to do if you ever have to do it,” she said.

Although four lives were tragically lost and the school and its faculty and students will never be the same, Kreyenbuhl said he is grateful the district implemented a system that enabled him to protect his students.

“I actually saw the lockdown initiate before I even heard the gunshots, so I had time to prepare,” he said. “Someone saw the threat even before he started to engage, so it’s almost like we knew before anything truly even happened, before lives were taken.”

“It’s insane the technology we have access to.”

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