In this featured piece by School Security Leadership, the publication shares a case study on how Edgewood High School of the Sacred Heart in Madison, Wisconsin, added the InformaCast Wearable Alert Badge from Singlewire Software to its emergency response plan without treating it as a separate system. Even though Wisconsin has not enacted Alyssa’s Law, Edgewood moved ahead, phasing in the technology alongside the training and procedures it already used. The article focuses on the school’s approach: grounding staff in a shared response protocol first, layering in InformaCast and the badges over time, and dedicating a full day of training so the tools strengthened an existing plan rather than becoming one more system to learn.
Key Takeaways
- Edgewood moved ahead of any mandate: with Wisconsin yet to enact Alyssa’s Law, the school added wearable alert badges proactively as part of a broader effort to strengthen emergency response.
- Fit mattered most: the school’s top requirement was that the badges align with its existing technology, notification infrastructure, and response model, so staff gained a new tool rather than a separate system to learn.
- Order of operations counts: Edgewood grounded staff in the Standard Response Protocol first, then added InformaCast to change the building’s status for responses from a Hold to a Lockdown, and introduced the wearable badges last.
- Training built confidence: the school dedicated a full eight-hour day to protocol training, which helped staff understand their roles and see the technology as part of one plan — its safety leader notes a technology-first approach without that grounding rarely earns the user confidence a tool needs to work.
- Technology should share responsibility, not just add features: the badges let staff initiate a response from anywhere on campus, not only the administrative office, and before adopting any tool, schools should ask whether it complements the plan, builds user confidence, and will still be used two years on.
Original Story
As more states adopt Alyssa’s Law requirements for school panic alert systems, some schools are moving ahead with the technology even without a state mandate.
Edgewood High School of the Sacred Heart in Madison, Wis., is among them. The school recently equipped faculty and staff with InformaCast Wearable Alert Badges from Singlewire Software as part of a broader effort to strengthen its emergency response capabilities.
Wisconsin has not enacted Alyssa’s Law, but similar legislation has gained momentum across the country. View our state tracker here.
For Edgewood, a key consideration was how the wearable alerts would fit into what the school already had in place.
“Most importantly, the system needed to seamlessly align with our existing technology, notification infrastructure, and crisis response model,” Tim Patton, Edgewood’s director of facilities and safety, told School Security Leadership.