The Challenge
Unity School, a private school located in Delray Beach, cares for 75 faculty and staff members and 375 students from toddlers to eighth graders. Their leadership takes student safety seriously and strives to provide peace of mind for children, parents, and teachers.
“Research year over year from independent school surveys shows that parents choose private schools based on their children’s holistic experience, and one of their top key driving forces is student safety,” says Unity School’s Head of School Genevieve Hoppe.
To support their commitment, Unity School dedicates significant resources to ensuring campus safety and preventing emergency situations. Their large campus, comprised of four buildings and outdoor learning areas spread over nine acres, requires a robust monitoring effort.
“Unity School is your traditional South Florida campus,” says Hoppe. “Almost every door on our campus opens outside, and we have a lot of outdoor learning space.”
Considering its scale, setting, and footprint, Unity School was initially challenged to find a suitable security partner to ensure its security goals were met.
“Having robust security measures to keep our students and our staff from harm starts with protecting the perimeter,” Hoppe continues. “In addition to our cameras and monitoring systems, our campus is fully gated, and two armed guards are onsite for the entire duration of our school day. We need a partner and solution who supports this.”
To further enhance their capabilities, Unity School chose to integrate their safety infrastructure with local dispatch and law enforcement to ensure a swift, direct response in the event of an emergency.
“When our students and teachers are in an emergency situation, actually having time to stop and call the police, or make an accurate report, can be really challenging,” Hoppe observes. “We wanted to do all that we could to maximize their safety during an emergency while also ensuring an immediate, aggressive response by police.”
Unity School also searched for an effective means to communicate emergencies across its sprawling campus. After notifying emergency response, it was critical to effectively communicate the situation to students and staff dispersed across the campus. This process could become complicated and time-consuming with a conventional security system.
The Solution
To achieve its safety objectives, Unity School partnered with SOS Technologies to employ its SmartSOS™ platform on campus. With SOS Technologies, the school protects and reassures its students and faculty that they are safe because of unrivaled emergency monitoring, prevention, and response capabilities.
“SOS Technologies provides us with peace of mind through rapid communication,” Hoppe says. “If anything happens, when we activate our alert buttons, we know that the police are going to be notified immediately that we’re having a problem. They’ll receive detailed data regarding where on our campus an incident is taking place and provide a rapid response. That is the most important piece, right there – that SOS Technologies ensures that help is coming to us.”
The SmartSOS™ security platform integrates directly with local dispatch to engage first responders within seconds of an alarm being engaged. Traditional 911 processes require significantly more time – sometimes minutes – before notifying first responders, leading to additional time until they arrive.
The Partnership
“An incredible benefit of SOS Technologies is that their platform sends text messages and emails directly to all of our employees,” says Hoppe. Before SOS, alerting staff and first responders required a complicated process.
In addition to calling 911 to alert law enforcement, the process of alerting staff on campus involved “making intercom announcements, using multiple codes, trying to remember the script,” Hoppe further explains. “SOS Technologies streamlines this by sending direct text messages to everyone in our system, telling them that there’s an emergency and where it is located.”With the SOS system in place, faculty and staff can now commit greater focus to monitoring and protecting students during an emergency.
SmartSOS alert buttons can be installed indoors or outdoors or even worn as pendants by faculty, which is ideal for Unity School’s large, indoor-outdoor campus.
“We have certain staff who have pendants, like the guards and our nurses, that are frequently moving around the campus. We have many, many buttons on campus: outdoors at the playground, in classrooms, in the cafeteria, and in the gym,” explains Hoppe.
She continues, “And for every teacher, we hold training with SOS Technologies. We just did it a couple of weeks ago, where SOS came in and talked about their programming platform. We run everyone through practice scenarios. Everyone understands what the buttons do, and that they do have the authority to push a button in the event of an emergency.”
“The SOS Technologies team is incredibly knowledgeable, very responsive, and professional, and quick to help make things easy for our school,” says Hoppe. “That’s been my consistent experience working with them.”
Parents appreciate the value of a cutting-edge security system to ensure their children’s safety. “As a private school, we do want to try and have the safest campus possible,” Hoppe explains. “Our parents do know that we have [SOS Technologies], and they do understand our entire comprehensive safety plan. We mention it on our admissions tours because people want to know, ‘How safe is this campus?’”