In this featured piece by Building Services Management, the publication reports on new data from Singlewire Software showing that everyday communication — not emergencies — makes up the vast majority of activity in K-12 schools, and that this daily use is what builds confident emergency response. The State of K-12 Critical Communications Report draws on actual notification activity from about 16,000 schools using the Singlewire InformaCast critical communication and incident management platform, covering more than 19.5 million notifications and more than 343 million device activations across the 2025-26 school year. Unlike a survey, it offers a system-of-record look at how schools truly used their communication systems, message by message.
Key Takeaways
- Everyday use is the foundation of emergency readiness: 92% of school notifications were routine operational messages and only 8% were emergency alerts, so the systems staff rely on daily become familiar infrastructure when it matters most.
- Routine messaging dominates the day: automated bell schedules made up 60% of messaging and live paging another 28% — together about 88% of everything schools sent.
- Of the five Standard Response Protocol actions from The “I Love U Guys” Foundation — Hold, Secure, Lockdown, Evacuate, and Shelter — Lockdown drove roughly 72% of real-world emergency message volume, nearly 10 times the other four combined; Singlewire is a proud mission partner of the foundation.
- Emergency communication doesn’t stop at dismissal: schools sent about 52,000 emergency notifications on weekends, with overnight activity rising between 11 p.m. and 2 a.m., underscoring the need to plan for after-hours incidents.
- Coverage should be checked building by building: because messaging scales with the number of buildings rather than enrollment, smaller districts sent about three times more messages per student than large ones, making per-facility coverage essential at any size.
Original Story
New data from Singlewire Software shows that routine communication makes up the vast majority of activity across K-12 schools, and that this everyday use forms the foundation for a confident emergency response.
Singlewire Software has released “The State of K-12 Critical Communications Report,” which highlights trends in how K-12 schools shared daily and emergency messages during the 2025-26 school year.
The report analyzes actual notification activity from approximately 16,000 K-12 schools that use the Singlewire InformaCast critical communication and incident management platform.
The analysis covers more than 19.5 million notifications and more than 343 million device activations across the full 2025–26 school year.