Recording from Wednesday, October 8, 2025
What This Standard Response Protocol Webinar Covered
Getting the right message to the right people in the right seconds requires more than a plan on paper. It requires shared language, practiced systems, and relationships that exist before an incident begins. This webinar brought together a retired law enforcement commander, the alliance director of The “I Love U Guys” Foundation, a district technology director who has built a fully integrated safety ecosystem, and Singlewire Software to walk through what it takes to make the Standard Response Protocol (SRP) function in the real world.
The discussion opened with an overview of the SRP’s five actions — Hold, Secure, Lockdown, Evacuate, and Shelter in Place — and why a common vocabulary matters across every audience. When students, staff, parents, first responders, and the media all use the same terms for the same situations, confusion drops and response time improves. A real-world example from the webinar made the point clearly: a district using Singlewire InformaCast alongside SRP protocols placed a school into a Secure that same morning. Because the community recognized the term and understood what it meant, the response was calm, coordinated, and resolved without escalation.
Jay Grossman, Director of Technology for Saline Area Schools in Michigan, walked through how his district consolidated what had been three separate systems — PA, bells, and emergency notifications — into a single InformaCast platform. The result: staff train on one system, use it every day for routine operations, and can initiate any of the five SRP scenarios from a phone app, desk phone speed dial, or wall-mounted button. Strobe lights above welding stations and message takeovers on digital clocks ensure the alert reaches every person in the building regardless of where they are or what they’re doing. The district has also configured InformaCast to automatically notify first responders and, if the situation warrants, escalate directly to 911.
The panel closed with practical guidance for any district looking to strengthen its response without starting over. The SRP and all its accompanying resources — classroom posters, parent handouts in more than 20 languages, and reunification materials — are available at no cost at iloveyouguys.org. Most schools already own hardware InformaCast can connect to. And the relationships that make every layer of a safety plan work — with the police chief, the fire department, neighboring districts — begin with something as simple as a conversation over coffee.
Panel Participants
Chris Swietlik (Host) • Director of Communications • Singlewire Software
Pat Hamilton • Alliance Director • The “I Love U Guys” Foundation
Mike Hanson • Retired Captain, Madison P.D.; Founder • Mission Secure Consulting
Jay Grossman • Director of Technology • Saline Area Schools, Michigan
Ryan Mauer • Regional Manager • Singlewire Software
Five Key Takeaways for Faster School and First Responder Coordination
- Communication is the most common failure point — and the most fixable — When The “I Love U Guys” Foundation asked schools and first responders to name their biggest challenge in their last crisis, the same answer surfaced repeatedly: communication. The SRP’s five shared actions — Hold, Secure, Lockdown, Evacuate, and Shelter in Place — give every audience the same vocabulary for the same situations. When parents, media, neighboring districts, and dispatchers all recognize the same terms, the response stays coordinated and communities stay calmer.
- Daily use is what makes emergency use reliable — The districts that trust their technology most are the ones that use it every day. When InformaCast runs the bells, handles PA announcements, and powers digital signage, staff are using the same platform they will rely on in an emergency. As one panelist put it: when the bell rings, you have just tested your emergency system. Familiarity built through routine moments removes hesitation when it matters most.
- Drills should build muscle memory, not elevate stress — Announced drills with advance notice to first responders, a brief teacher-led framing conversation beforehand, and talking points sent home to parents are what make safety practice effective and sustainable. The goal is repetition, not simulation of panic. Schools that treat drills as rehearsals — running through the physical motions in low-stakes conditions — build the confidence that performs under pressure. After-action reviews and staff surveys after each drill close the gaps.
- Involve first responders before the day you need them — Law enforcement want to be invited in. Bi-monthly coordination meetings, shared InformaCast notification lists, and automatic 911 escalation built into the platform ensure that first responders know what is happening at the same moment school staff do. Sending a 24-hour advance notice email before every drill preserves the trust that makes those automatic notifications credible. Relationships formed in ordinary moments — over lunch, at a tabletop exercise, during a building walk — are what hold under pressure.
- You don’t have to replace what you already have — The SRP and all its resources — classroom posters, parent handouts in more than 20 languages, and reunification materials — are available at no cost at iloveyouguys.org. Most schools already own the hardware InformaCast can connect to: PA speakers, Cisco phones, digital signage, and existing strobe systems. A zone controller can tie analog speaker systems into the platform without replacing a single device. Safety grants are available to close remaining funding gaps, and the path forward can be built one building and one relationship at a time.
Resources Referenced in This Webinar
The “I Love U Guys” Foundation — SRP resources (free)
Saline Area Schools InformaCast case study (video)
Standard Reunification Method webinar (on demand)
Singlewire Safety Grant Funding Guide
www.singlewire.com/safety-grants
Put the SRP into action across every device
InformaCast integrates the five SRP actions into a single platform — delivering the right message to every speaker, phone, screen, and wearable the moment an incident begins. Connect with our team to see how it works in your school.
Read the Full Webinar Transcript
This transcript was generated from the recording and lightly edited for readability. Speaker attributions are approximate.
Chris Swietlik — Host · Singlewire Software
Alright. I wanna thank everyone for joining us today. We’re gonna get underway.
Thank you for joining us for today’s webinar, seconds matter, implementing standard protocols and technology for faster school and first responder coordination.
Today’s webinar is presented by Singlewire Software and the I Love You Guys foundation. I’m Chris Swietlik, director of communications at Singlewire Software.
Today, we’ll be covering the I Love You Guys standard response protocol, also known as the SRP, in schools to enable fast coordination and rapid first responder action.
Over the course of this discussion, we’ll be covering best practices for building and practicing your plan, as well as involving law enforcement and drills and using technology to integrate and automate the standard response protocol.
A few housekeeping items before we get underway. Throughout the webinar, all attendees will be muted. So if you have questions, please put them into the chat.
We’ll have people addressing these questions throughout the webinar, and we’ll bring them into the conversation, as we have the opportunity to, and we’ll also leave time at the end, for any additional questions attendees might have.
Also, this session is being recorded, so we’ll have a link to access the recording sent out after it has concluded, if you need to drop off early or if you have other people, within your organization, that would benefit from the information being shared today.
To get underway, I wanna start by introducing our panelists that we have here today, and I’m gonna start with Mike Hansen.
Mike Hanson — Retired Captain, Madison P.D. · Mission Secure Consulting
Well, thank you, Chris. It’s a pleasure to be here, and I’m excited for the next hour or so discussion here. My name is Mike Hanson. I’m a retired Madison police captain from Madison, Wisconsin here.
Also, I’m founder of Mission Secure Consulting, which we work with schools and businesses on security assessments and evaluations. Then I’ve been an instructor for Northwestern University at their school of police staff and command. And excited for today’s commentary questions and discussion here. So thank you for having me.
Chris Swietlik
Thank you for joining us. Next, we’re gonna have Pat Hamilton.
Pat Hamilton — Alliance Director · The “I Love U Guys” Foundation
Hi, Chris. Thanks for having me. My name is Pat Hamilton. I’m the alliance director for the I Love You Guys Foundation.
I’ve worked full time for the foundation as a staff member now for about a year and a half. Before joining the foundation as an employee, I was on the board of directors for nearly a decade and spent twenty three years in public education all on the operation side. Twenty of those years, I was responsible for safety and security of our school district and I worked with John Michael and Ellen like I said since about two thousand and eight and Mike, I was just on the Northwestern campus recently. I was there doing some training in the community but enjoyed some quality time on campus as well.
Mike Hanson
It’s a beautiful university. Yeah.
Pat Hamilton
It is. Absolutely.
Chris Swietlik
Alright. Thanks for joining us, Pat. Next, we have Jay Grossman.
Jay Grossman — Director of Technology · Saline Area Schools, Michigan
Hi, Chris. Hi, everyone. My name is Jay Grossman. I am the director of technology for Saline Area Schools located in Saline, Michigan.
I’ve been in this role for about six years and inherited InformaCast as I came into this, made it my baby and been growing with it ever since then. Before that, I’ve spent since twenty twelve working in some sort of technology aspect for, public schools. Really excited to be here, and thank you all for joining us today.
Chris Swietlik
Thank you, Jay. And lastly, we have Ryan Mauer.
Ryan Mauer — Regional Manager · Singlewire Software
Hey, everybody. My name is Ryan. I’m a regional manager here at Singlewire Software, so, lead and support team of account managers that, that works with, K-12 customers like Jay across the country in both our InformaCast and Visitor Aware Software solutions, obviously, and then partnerships with, with the I Love You Guys Foundation and Pat. So it’s great to be here. Thanks for everybody for, for joining.
Chris Swietlik
Alright. Well, thank you all for joining us today.
Because today’s webinar is gonna be focused on the standard response protocol, I think it would be helpful if we establish what that is. So, Pat, I’m wondering if you could start by walking us through the SRP and its purpose.
Pat Hamilton
Sure. I’d be happy to. So the standard response protocol is based on five actions. It’s an all hazards institutional approach to managing crisis in a school. It was designed intentionally, initially for K-12 schools, but we’re finding that it’s being used in houses of worship, higher education, healthcare facilities. So it really can apply to any facility really.
So holding your classroom, that’s the first one, just hold, holding your classroom area. That’s if there’s something going on in the hallway that’s not an event that would require a lockdown. So maybe you’ve got a staff member that’s having a medical issue or maybe you have a dysregulated student in the hallway. Let’s just keep everyone out of that area while we’re dealing with that situation.
You know, it gives the person that’s experiencing that situation some dignity and some privacy while we’re dealing with that. So no trauma, no drama, business as usual in the classroom. Secure, get inside and lock the outside doors. That is if there’s something going on in your community outside of your school that we don’t want to come inside.
So, we’ve had a couple of reports just this year of schools in the northwest where they’ve had, it was actually one district where they’ve had a moose on the playground two times. So there was a moose on the loose in the community and they put the school on a secure because that’s a dangerous animal and we need to get people inside the building. Let’s lock the outside doors. But it could also be, maybe there’s criminal activity occurring or something like that, but it’s simple.
Just get inside, locked outside doors, business as usual inside the building. That means you can have passing periods, things like that. Lockdown, that’s an active assailant occurring inside of your building. We’re gonna do lockdown, locks lights out of sight.
So, and that’s the order that we need people to take and the actions they need to take. So, if you have an opportunity to do a very quick search or a cursory search of the hallway, grab a few kids in there but once that door locked, then, it’s gonna stay locked until law enforcement comes and releases that lockdown. So, it’s locks, lights, out of sight. Evacuate. I tell people that’s kind of the OG of crisis protocols.
We’ve been doing that one since I was a kid and that’s been decades and decades ago. I won’t say how many but it was a long time ago that we were we’ve been doing fire drills. So, but it’s evacuate and it’s always followed by to a specific location. You know, it could be evacuate to our fire location, evacuate to our shelter in place, whatever that is.
So, kind of depends on the and by the way, I just said two at once because you can layer these protocols and then the last is shelter in place. I grew up in Tornado Alley. So, you know, our shelter in place was tornadoes and we did those drills a lot. But in places like the Pacific Northwest that I just mentioned or Hawaii where we train, you know, that for them, in place means tsunami or something like that.
So, it’s based on the hazards that are in your community. So it’s a good opportunity for you to talk to your first responders. You might have a rail line that goes to your community that carries hazmat and you don’t even know it. So that’s what shelter in place is.
So it’s shelter in place for the hazards that are existing in your community. So that’s the very high level overview. By the way that took less than five minutes you can do that with all of your classroom teachers. Five actions, five minutes.
Chris Swietlik
That’s a great foundation for us to start with Pat.
And I think when we’re talking about response, we will talk more about each of these elements as we go through the today’s webinar. But when we’re talking about response, we’re often talking about time. How quickly can we get people there? How quickly can we intervene in something that’s happening? And a lot of the times with schools, that requires coordination with first responders.
And, Mike, I’m wondering if you can give from your perspective, what are some of the challenges that schools face when an emergency or critical event occurs?
Mike Hanson
Yeah. Thank you. That’s a good question, Chris.
There’s a few that come to mind right away from some of the experiences we’ve had, as first responders and being a commander at some of these scenes is one, overall, we know that the first few minutes are critical. And how confident is the staff that is in that building, in dealing with an extreme crisis. And that comes through reps and training. And so oftentimes we see the training just really stale. Like we know at nine am we’re doing this drill on this Tuesday during this month instead of trying to really simulate when a lot of these events happen and that is in a lunchroom during hall passing times when there’s already commotion chaos in a school or other buildings that we really don’t train during that time. So that’s one aspect. Another aspect is just how do people know?
If your school has multiple wings or floors, how are you alerted to the fact that there is an incident going on in a wing and you really reside in b or c wing? So, what we find is, people doubting all this just another drill or it’s firecrackers or whatever they’re doubting, they really don’t have a system wide communication scale to realize this is an emergency event and, then what we also find is a reluctance or hesitancy to always drill with law enforcement. I’m telling you from experience, law enforcement loves training and they love to be able to be invited to trainings. Especially if you know in advance that there’s a training in two months or something that’s going to be high scale.
Law enforcement wants to do that and then they’ll also do the smaller trainings where it’s just with administrators, tabletops. But the main focus is building confidence through that training and sometimes we see in these school districts either lack of powerful relationships with law enforcement and we’re going to be the first ones responding. Those first five minutes are everything as far as confidence, knowing what to do, where to go, and ensuring your staff knows what to do. Law enforcement knows what to do, they’re coming in, but we just need to make sure that there’s better relations between schools and law enforcement to ensure that the confidence is there. But alerting everybody is paramount.
Pat Hamilton
Mike, we always tell people, and this is something that we sometimes lose sight of, but at the end of the day, when those police officers go home and they take that uniform off, what are they oftentimes?
Their parents in your community and their kids go to your school. So, it’s it’s usually not a big ask to have them come to the school and participate. They’re, like you said, they’re eager to help and it’s let’s not lose sight of the fact that they’re they’re parents probably first and then they have their responsibility as a first responder second. So, absolutely invite them in. I love to hear that.
Ryan Mauer
I agree with that and you know, what’s interesting is you know, I had a situation this morning as a parent, where our local district, where my wife and our three boys, they go to school, where, our school was actually placed into, the secure safety protocol. So they’re in, I Love You Guys and an InformaCast user, and I experienced it as a parent. And the first thing that they did is communicate quickly. I know that our InformaCast platform is communicating on-site to the students and staff as to what’s happening. And then the protocol is driving the plan to execute. It turned out the threat was not valid. But the communication cycle occurred, the partnership they have with the local police department allowed for that response.
I saw the capital S Secure. And because I know the protocol and the protocol has been communicated into the community, I recognize it’s not an imminent threat, but that they’re making sure that whether it’s an animal on a loose in a playground or something else, that they’re handling it. And that connection between the district and the local PD inside of the protocol’s expectations is what ultimately led to a successful resolution. So there’s real world parent and community member aspects to this protocol that are very near and dear to me and very within the last few hours.
Mike Hanson
Wow. That’s incredible, Ryan. That’s, that’s real life. What law enforcement likes, and this goes to the I Love You Guys Foundation, is the simplicity of that.
I mean, this is for kindergarten, through college, through business worlds. We love the simplicity of it, training it, and it’s the same nomenclature whether you’re in second grade or a junior in high school. And then it’s so simple, as Pat described, that parents, as you see this come across your text or computer, you know exactly what’s happening. That’s timely.
Pat Hamilton
Ryan, your story warms my heart, Ryan.
Ryan Mauer
Yeah, you never want it to happen, right? You never want to have to initiate those protocols but that’s why ensuring that to Mike’s point, like the preparation, the drilling, the kind of practice of that muscle memory and exercising it is extremely important and as a professional, I’m grateful that our software platforms are in play and that they’re being executed and utilized.
But it does. It makes me feel comfortable as a parent knowing those protocols are in action.
Chris Swietlik
I think the one thing that really came across in all your points is the importance of communication and that importance between the school communicating with parents, with the community, with law enforcement, making sure that communication goes both ways.
When we’re talking about something like the standard response protocol, when schools if they don’t have anything in place, if this is a new concept for them, sometimes new things can be met with resistance.
What are some misconceptions that you often hear, Pat, from schools or parents about implementing the standard response protocol?
Pat Hamilton
I think there’s a host of those and it would be and I’ll talk about these, but it’ll be interesting to get Jay and Mike’s comments as well. But I think first off is maybe that there’s a cost associated with it and it’s really not. There’s an effort, it’s gonna require your fingerprints on it. We tell people if you buy it, it gathers dust. If you build it, it gathers fingerprints. Well, SRP and SRM are designed for you to build it yourself.
All the resources are available at no cost at iloveyouguys.org. So you can go and download, there’s the parent letters, for example, we have those in twenty different languages, classroom posters, everything you need to implement the program is available to you at no cost, but it’s going to take some work and it’s going to take some partnerships. And that’s kind of we used to say this was the side effect of implementing the SRP is you’re going to create these relationships with people that you may not have had before you started the implementation. Your law enforcement partners, fire, EMS, those folks.
To get this all implemented correctly, you need all of them, everyone in the room. And then once you’ve established those relationships, now you’re starting to talk about something that goes on in perpetuity. And it’s like, we’re going to meet quarterly maybe and keep this momentum going. And it starts to trickle out in your community as well.
So cost, I think, sometimes is a fear maybe, and complication too. Not a complicated, Mike talked about this. It’s very easy, straightforward, five actions. It creates common terminology that you could use for your first responders, your parents, your teachers, and your students.
Your students need to understand it as well. So getting past some of those fears that really don’t need to be there would be probably some of those things as well. That’s probably some of the big complications. So yeah, build the relationships, invite people to come and talk to you about what this is, and go for it.
Mike Hanson
I just love the fact that it’s free. Right? So no one could say it’s a budget issue.
It’s very simple on purpose that with the five standards, and it’s universal through not only the education system, but for first responders as well. So it’s a beautiful program. I hope people are either already on board with it or considering it. There’s really not a reason not to.
And then it just takes commitment, and it takes commitment by the first responders in your community and it takes commitment by the school district as well. But I can’t imagine a police chief or sheriff saying, no. We don’t wanna do this. Let’s stay away from it because it is for life.
You could use this beyond all the education system and into businesses. So there should not be major roadblocks.
Jay Grossman
Yeah. And sorry, had a little technical difficulty. Hopefully, everyone can see me now. One of the things I really wanted to bring to light with this is once we adopted the SRP, it was really like a breath of fresh air because in the school district, you know, in programming the system when we brought on InformaCast, not having clarity or direction of what to say, what terminology to use, I was guessing at what we wanted our messages to say, making sure they were clear, making sure they were understood.
Sure. But once we adopted the I Love You Guys protocol and there is a script for what do you say in a lockdown? What do you say in a Secure? What do you say for a hold?
It was, I, it was like a guiding light almost for me where I was able to then go right in, adjust all my messages. So, we use the same terminology that we knew that our law enforcement, our first responders would also be aware of, making sure that the messages were short and clear. So it really gave me direction and clarity again on what these alerts should say, what it should sound like, what we can train all of our staff to be aware of. So they’re getting the same consistent message in every building for each of the various, different types of scenarios that could happen there.
So, you know, getting that direction was really important in guiding how we set up our system.
Pat Hamilton
And Jay, you guys were, another misconception is that you can, you know, if you are an Alice District or avoid, deny, defend, that you can’t be SRP too. And I think you all are both. And the reality is that the systems do work together. It’s not an either or. It is, you know, we run both. So were you guys using Alice or something else before SRP?
Jay Grossman
Yes. So we are, we are an Alice School District, and we’re actually going through retraining on Alice right now, and that’s exactly right. It’s not an either or, and that was a misconception our staff had with our trainings was, you know, well, we’re training Alice, which do we do? And the real answer is you do both. You know, we use the SRP as the communication piece, get the message out there, get the communication, get locked down, locks lights out of sight, but then once you’re in that lockdown scenario, you can switch right away to your Alice training and follow those protocols. If, you know, If it’s clear and you need to get out of there, go, if you’re not, you follow your training. So we use this as our communication bridge and then follow the other trainings we have to make sure everybody is kept as safe as possible.
Mike Hanson
If I could just jump in here just for a second. What you’re talking about Jay and Pat with communication is so critical in an emergency. So what we find is people freeze, especially if they don’t have the reps in training or the confidence, and they wanna be told what to do. And they need immediate direction.
Their heart is racing. Their breathing is increased, and they don’t know what to do. They freeze or panic in these situations. Rightfully so.
Right? It’s not something that you dream up every day. And so if we have system in systems in place that give clear, concise directions to hundreds of people that are geared towards keeping them safe, that you’ve rehearsed, trained before as administrators and then as teachers and as students, that saves lives. We know that.
And it we also know that people feel more confident and that they’re gonna survive whatever encounter is happening. And that’s what we want. That’s the goal of this is very clear, concise, sometimes prerecorded messages. So no one has to fumble with the phone and try and think of what to say in panic situation, it’s just flat out there.
Ryan Mauer
I think it’s great. I think, Jay, can you speak a little bit because that’s a great point around the efficiency and how quick you can get messages across multiple platforms. You’ve built this out, and I think it would be really great for everyone to hear how you’ve leveraged both the protocol and then the InformaCast platform to make that happen in your district?
Jay Grossman
Yeah. Sure. So in our district with InformaCast, we’re we’re using both message templates and then the scenarios, to help really quickly get this information out. So the way I built it up, you know, you can use the app on your phone, and our administrators have each scenario, which as of last night, now that InformaCast and I Love You Guys have integrated, the images from I Love You Guys are built into InformaCast.
I actually just went in and updated all of our scenarios to now have that image. So, you know, the secure image, the icon for lockdown all match what we’re used to seeing. They can just go on their, phone on the app. They can press that and initiate any one of those scenarios.
But also the flexibility to I can use I have a lockdown button that we can push in the event of an emergency that will trigger the lockdown. I have speed dials on our phones that are set up that can also trigger any one of the alerts. And the fact that it gets out there, you know, we utilize our speakers, we utilize signage, we utilize a number of different technologies to make sure that message is broadcast to as many people as quickly as possible. We even use the functionality that, outside guests can send a text message to a phone number and join the InformaCast alerts if they wish to.
You know, so if you’re going on a field trip and you’re away from the school, you can get that alert if there’s a lockdown so you know, hey, it’s not safe to come back yet. So really in building that up with the technology, making sure that it’s accessible to as many people to use and that it gets out there as quickly as possible. You know, we’re also going down the road of starting to look at, the wearable technologies that can push a button and that can go trigger a lockdown as well.
Pat Hamilton
Jay, what you’re talking about there, so when John Michael and Ellen started the foundation, one of the first things they did was go around the country and talk to people and they asked the question, in your last crisis, what was the biggest challenge you faced? And the first answer they got was communication. The second answer they got was communication. And the third answer they got was communication.
And that was from all different levels. So that’s your law enforcement partners. It’s your parents, it’s your teachers, it’s everyone. So when you have, I guess, conformity in that messaging, you’ve seen the same icons and logos in the classroom posters as the parents get and then there’s also iloveyouguys.org shameless plug.
If you’re a school district, we give you templates for communicating with parents so they can see that and you can reinforce what these protocols are. So when they see them like Ryan did today, which I just can’t believe that it happened today. Ryan is a kismet.
So when he sees that, then he knows, okay, this is what this is. It’s not critical. They’re taking some precautions. So that communication is just so critical and the speed of that deescalates your parents.
It keeps people from just showing up at your door so you’re not trying to manage a crisis within a crisis. So I’m glad to hear that you, are using our logos and icons, man. This is Yeah. I think I can just turn my camera off and let your mic on.
Jay Grossman
Well, think it also plays into that muscle memory like you’re saying. If we have all the icons matching everything everybody’s trained to see, then, you know, you don’t have to take that extra second to read which word it is. You know, the lock icon is gonna trigger the lockdown. You know the three people is the evacuate or the person underneath the roof is the shelter icon.
It helps speed up that time and you know, seconds matter, right? Like, that is what this conversation’s about is how do we get this out as quickly into as many people as possible. So using that consistency is really helpful not only so that people can recognize the icons, but so that they can recognize it quickly. And, you know, when you’re in that moment and adrenaline’s rushing, you know, it’s the lowest motor skill that takes place. And if you know what button to look for or color even, you know, you can hit the right one and make sure you’re getting the message out, to people as quick as possible.
Chris Swietlik
I think that’s a really good point, Jay. And as we’ve talked here, obviously, this is about responding to emergencies. I think we’ve made it very clear that effective response relies on strong communication.
And a lot of schools have a lot of tools already in place that they’re using to communicate with people, but I think the challenge that we often hear is that those tools don’t work together necessarily. So there’s a lot of time that can be wasted. There’s a lot of issues that can arise with certain channels being missed, especially during those high pressure crisis moments.
Jay, I know your school district has a lot of technology in place.
Maybe you can just walk us through maybe a before and after of the technology you had in place, the challenges that you had when it didn’t work together, and what you’ve developed, that’s working today.
Jay Grossman
Yeah. Sure. I’d be happy to, if you have a few minutes. No. Seriously, when I came into this school district, and again, when I came in, we were just starting to pilot InformaCast.
What we had in our schools was what every school has, a PA system. And when you have a PA system, you have one form of communication to be standing there at the phone to announce the message, and that takes time, that puts people at risk. Bringing in InformaCast, we were able to leverage number of pieces of technology. So one thing I really love about InformaCast, I will say, is it’s device agnostic.
Right?
It works with PA speakers. It works with our Cisco phones. It works with digital signage. It works through text, email, you name it.
It I look at it just as a communication platform, and the end device is what you have. So, we’ve been able to integrate it into all our PA speakers throughout our school without having to replace anything. We also took advantage of getting technology and adding a few extra items like, some IP speakers that can do strobe lights. They can do messages.
We’ve integrated it into, as I said, our Cisco phone system. We use RiseVision for our digital signage and using a protocol, InformaCast can take over that signage and put up a message there too. And then one that I’m really proud of that we brought in, and I will say we actually took this from another district that we saw using this as, you know, just, strobe lights themselves, which can be so helpful. Think about if you have a welding classroom like we have and students are sitting there and they’re welding, their heads are down, they’ve got helmets on, they’re not hearing anything. We’ve placed strobe lights above their heads so that if there is an alert, it’s going off above them just enough to give them, something to see and say, oh, I need to stop what I’m doing. I need to look at what I’m, you know, what’s going on and pay more attention to get that attention going.
You know, we’ve even taken it as far with some of these digital signs that have the strobe lights built in. Because as we see here in school districts, we have such a varied population that we have students with disabilities. Some might not be able to hear. Some might have vision impairments.
So we try and address all of that to the point that even if you’re color blind, we have set up our strobe lights in such a way that the leftmost strobe means one thing, the middle strobe means another, the farthest to the right strobe is yet another type of scenario. So again, the end goal here is communicate to as many people as quickly as possible in as many ways as we can get it out there so that we ensure that anybody who is in our building, no matter what, can see, hear, know that something’s going on, take action, get to the right place, and then hopefully those drills and that training take over so they know, alright, this is a lockdown.
I need to get inside whatever door I can find quickly and get out of sight. And so I’m I’m happy to say that over the six years, we’ve implemented this into every single one of our schools, and it didn’t take forklifting the entire system. We were able to use stuff that we already have in place and just link InformaCast to it.
Mike Hanson
What I like about that, Jay, is, there’s trusted devices that students are always looking at for homecoming or announcements or something, and our senses go to wanting to be safe. And so if there is gunfire or something going on in the school, the mind goes to the lowest denominator for safety. Oh, maybe that’s fireworks. Maybe somebody drops something. And in a real emergency, seconds matter. We need to get to safety and get out of there or protect ourselves in a room.
And if there are already trusted devices that students and faculty are used to looking at and they know there’s messages on these boards, it sounds like in your school and with this package here that it’s instant. It would show up right away on the screen, and that’s exactly what we want. I absolutely love the idea of strobe lights. You could even make those blue for some sort of police related, red for medical or fire related, and that is just awesome. And when you’re when you have a community already trained to look at those message boards in more fun ways, then they also know to look there in emergency. That’s great work.
Jay Grossman
Yeah. And just adding on to that, like you said, with the trusted devices, we have digital clocks. Everybody looks at clocks. They know them all the time and when InformaCast triggers, that all of sudden, the time goes away and not only is the message coming out of a speaker with it and ones we have do happen to have multicolored strobe lights to also flash like you said to indicate different emergencies.
But the time disappears and a message starts coming across with that exact scenario. So, you know, somebody’s gonna hear where the sound’s coming. Their eyes are immediately drawn to where that sound’s going and there’s a message. You know, in our cafeteria, in our high school, we have a projector that is going on a screen in front of where everybody’s eating and usually it’s doing a slideshow and you know, talking about the today’s events.
Your eyes are drawn to that while you’re eating.
That message gets taken over. All of a sudden, a slide comes up and it says, lockdown locks, locks lights out of sight and that’s going to trigger the response that they’ve been practicing for all these years now that, some, it, it’s not like you said, just fireworks going on outside, something is different, something’s happening, we need to take action on it.
Ryan Mauer
Yeah. Think there’s one there’s a couple of a lot of great points in there, Jay, so thanks for that. I’m going to turn my camera off, and I’ll let you keep rolling. But the one thing that I think we talk about internally, at Singlewire, you referenced it with the InformaCast platform, is there’s these daily operational use cases, right? So there’s value in that, in that students and staff are seeing visual representation slide shows. The clock is a clock, right? You’re hearing announcements over the PA.
We have a talented engineer internally here at our team. His name is Ben. He always says, you know, it allows us to exercise the system every single day, right? So we know that in those daily operational use cases, that InformaCast platform is functioning and providing the communication platform.
But then in the event that something, whether it’s a drill or, in my children’s scenario today, a secure safety protocol, it’s the same exact, platform that’s driving that message. So there’s a value and a trust in it, both from, an administrator standpoint in your seat, right, because you know it’s working on the daily. And also, to Mike’s point, there’s folks that are kind of used to seeing this message and hear this message in an intrusive way to be able to get a response and elicit a response under a protocol. So that’s a great value, you know, I think, from just being able to be able to communicate on a daily and in an environment where we don’t really want to have to, but it’s necessary.
Jay Grossman
You bring up a great point there, Ryan. You know, adding to this, one of the things I also like about the platform itself is, as you said, it’s not just for the emergency notifications.
We’ve been able to, since bringing it in, we’ve been able to consolidate emergency notifications, our bells, and our PA from being three separate systems now into just one platform that I can train everybody how to use. So I can train my office staff on how to access the bell schedule. InformaCast now runs my bells in all my buildings. It is my PA system.
So I can train everybody how to use one system, one platform, and I only have to manage one platform, which, you know, adds time for me and my staff that we’re only looking after this one piece instead of having to go into three different servers and make sure that the bell schedule is working on this one and the PA system’s functioning properly with this one. And then on top of it, making sure that the emergency notification system talks to all of these. Now it’s all integrated into one thing. I know it works.
And like you said, we’re exercising it daily because the school bells are going off every day. The PA system is going off every day and making announcements. So we know it’s all working and that in the event that we have to actually trigger something or during one of our drills, I can rest easy knowing that it’s all going to work because it’s been working for all these other functions.
Chris Swietlik
Yeah. I think those are some key highlights there. One, you don’t want a tool that’s just sitting there waiting for someone to use it, because when that emergency does happen, they’re not gonna know what to do necessarily, or they’re not gonna be able to do it as quickly because they need to try and remember how to use it.
And then as you said, you know if you’re using it regularly that when you need it to work the most, it is because you’ve been putting it through its paces on a regular basis.
I think the other thing that we wanna touch on here too when we’re talking about, you know, what are the uses outside that response.
When we’re looking at response, we need people to be prepared, and part of the way to do that is through drills.
And so as we’re talking about how we can do drills, do them in an impactful way, do them in a way, as Pat, you said earlier, that doesn’t inflict trauma or drama. Love that as a little catchphrase. I mean, that is such an easy guiding principle to have in people’s mind, but it’s maybe not an easy thing to always execute. So how can, one, you pull that off, and two, how can you use technology to help support that goal?
Pat Hamilton
Yeah. I think it starts with a it’s a couple of different things. One, it’s you don’t need to do unannounced drills.
I’d say announce your drills, make sure that there’s an announcement within the drill itself, and also tell your parents ahead of time and your staff, there’s gonna be this drill, this is what the drill is about. And then maybe even spend a few before the drill, especially if it’s gonna be a lockdown drill. And we encourage people, show a video from our website or have teachers to spend two or three minutes, maybe five minutes talking about this is what this is, this is why we do it.
In your communication home to your parents, when you tell them we’re gonna run this drill in advance, you could also give your parents some talking points, Chris, that would help them continue the conversation when the student comes home. So student comes home and they say, you ask what did you learn today at school? And they talk about, we had a drill. If your parents are prepared to have a conversation after that, then they’re gonna be, it turns this into a, from a school lesson to a life lesson, a life skill, which I think is really important.
So one is advanced communication. Let’s not do unannounced drills. This is all about learning muscle memory and muscle habits. So we just have to go, we need to go through the motions.
And I’ll tell people like, I don’t want the pilot to go to thirty six thousand feet on the airplane and then depressurize the cabin for me to practice how to put my mask on. I don’t need to do that. So you can just tell me in advance and I’m going to be good. We’re going to do a little bit more with the drill.
We’re actually going to get up and go through the physical motion of locking the door, turning lights off, and then getting into our safe space.
But that’s all it has to be. We don’t have to have loud noises. We don’t have to light trash cans on fire to practice fire drills. So we don’t need the trauma or the drama. It’s muscle memory, and then it’s communication in advance.
Jay Grossman
I’ll just add on to that. That’s all excellent information that we practice when we’re doing our drills. You know, looking at it from a school, from a technology aspect, I really think we focus on communication aspect of it.
A couple things that we do here in our school district, we have bimonthly meetings with our first responders. We have monthly meetings with our district safety team, and then every other month, we invite our police chiefs, our fire chiefs to come in so that we’re all on the same page, making sure that we know what’s going on, that they know what’s going on.
We test the communication to make sure that, everybody’s receiving it. I actually make sure to include our first responders as users into InformaCast so that when an emergency goes off, they’re getting the message sent through to them. And then on top of that, as far as drills, we keep, an email group with all of these people on it as well. And that way, part of our protocol is before we do a drill within twenty four hours, we make sure we send out an email notification that goes to the administrators, that goes to the first responders so they’re informed, they’re aware that, hey, there’s a drill going on.
We had a lockdown drill today at one of our buildings, and we made sure that everybody knew that’s going on because the last thing we want to do is have a drill to be to be the district that cried wolf and have the police have to respond come lights flashing, pulling them away from something else that they might need to actually be at because we were doing a drill and they weren’t aware And that actually, with our scenario, what ended up happening is after we cleared it, it was accidentally set off again because one of our administrators was learning the system and pushed the lockdown button.
So we immediately sent out a follow-up notification to our first responders to let them know, hey, this is still a drill. We don’t need anything. Everything’s good.
And then we do a debrief. You know, after every one of our drills, we get all of our administrators involved. We talk about what’s going on. We send out surveys to the teachers in each of those buildings where something’s happening, and we ask them what went well, what could we do better, could you hear the messages in the places you were located, Did you hear when we went over the PA announcement and discussed the scenario that was gonna happen before we set off that lockdown? So we wanna make sure that everybody is involved in this. Everybody is clear with communication. You know, not only did the technology work, did everybody get it, but are we all on the same page and knowing what to do in those events?
Pat Hamilton
So you just, you just described, Jay, the whole sequence of a real crisis. So you’ve incorporated the use of technology into the drill. You’ve gone through the motions themselves. You’ve had an after action report, which we always recommend.
So that’s like, that is ideal. And then you’ve identified any gaps that you have in your ability to execute the standard response protocol. So whether that be, maybe you’ve got a sign out, maybe a door lock is sticking or something like that. But, and I forget, I failed to mention, and I’m gonna let Mike talk about this, but the importance of having your law enforcement involved with your drills. Now, Mike, this is, that’s your wheelhouse.
Mike Hanson
Yeah. And as I said earlier, police are happy to do this, especially if you have advanced notice. We know on September eighth, we’re doing this drill or what have you. We’ll dedicate command staff to it.
They’ll dedicate officers to it because we need the reps as well. We need to get into the schools. We need to know who your administrators are, your teachers, and that just goes a long way. And there’s so many non training things ways to have officers in the school if you don’t have an SRO, and that’s just simply inviting them for lunchtime, especially in the elementary school where they still don’t mind seeing the police.
Inviting the officers to walk through the hallways anytime, it shouldn’t be a threatening view or anything, but having them in for lunch, having them in to present on what the job is like, just so the officers have familiarity and then the students and staff do as well. I think that can’t be underscored enough. And then just if every month, and I like Jay’s progression there on how they train, but every month if there’s something that continues to build staff confidence, because really you, people on this webinar and the principals and administrators, you are the ones providing direction to hundreds of students and then working with law enforcement.
So if it’s not always a large scale training where there’s actual movement and announcements and everything, sprinkle in the table tops and invite law enforcement to that as well. Those are priceless as well because you have your school plans. What would you do in so many different, contingencies that happen? Okay?
We had something here in, my area where there was, an active shooter event and a round pierced a water main. So now all of a sudden you have water flooding the school. So when you tabletop, obviously you can’t do this type of training with students and administrators on a training day, but when you tabletop various scenarios that could come up, you can walk through it in a very casual, non threatening environment to at least discuss what would the next steps be with law enforcement, with firefighters, first responders, ambulance and at least that gets clicking through everyone’s mind on the next scenario, next thing that needs to happen And again, it all leads to building confidence and that’s what needs to happen in tragedies and emergencies, is having the confidence to get through it.
Pat Hamilton
I love free lunch. We actually did that for years in my district. We would offer any police help and that was to get not our SROs in but to get our patrol officers into our schools as well so they could, the kids would see them and get to know them.
Here’s what I learned through that. Make sure you let them know what day is pizza day because pizza day is also, it’s popular with the students and it was also popular with our law enforcement partners.
And then if you’re gonna invite fire, this is an opportunity like fire, we always like to have a little kidding with our fire folks, but ask them to cater the lunch for you, because those guys can really cook. But no, Pizza Day was popular with our law enforcement officers as well and by the way, be prepared because it’s like when you’re a police officer, you’re walking in that building and you’re like a celebrity when you walk into the elementary school kids. So, have your pen ready because you’re going to sign some autographs.
Very
Mike Hanson
true.
Yep.
Chris Swietlik
These are great perspectives on how to build those relationships with law enforcement and other first responders. We did have a question come in, that I’m gonna throw up here from Trent.
Talking about if anyone has used InformaCast to automatically call first responders. And I know we had some good responses in the chat. But, Jay, I was wondering if you could just talk about your district’s perspective on that as well.
Jay Grossman
Yeah. Sure. Absolutely. So, yes. We have set up our InformaCast system to automatically call first responders, and we do this in a couple of ways.
As I had mentioned earlier, one of the things I’ve done is worked with the police and fire chiefs to identify some key users that I just add right directly into our InformaCast. And that way, they get the text, they get the email, they get the app notification, whenever we set off, an alert. But on top of that, InformaCast has an escalation protocol that you can set up in there. So if an event happens that within a minute, I can have it set to automatically then go ahead and dial 911.
That way, if for some reason, all the various users I have either don’t get the message, can’t respond to it, are out. We’re making sure that we’re getting to law enforcement in one way or another. And honestly, I don’t in the event of that, I really don’t care if I’m bombarding them because if we’re having an active shooter, I want somebody to be responding and get there. So we do have our system set up to automatically call out to 911 if we don’t have enough of a response coming in within that first minute.
Now with the escalation, the way I’ve set up the rule is, it uses a it sends out a response question that either staff or teachers need to say, yes, you’re okay. And if it doesn’t get enough yeses to that, it’s going to automatically dial that out. So when we’re doing a drill, I do try and dial that back so only I have to actually say that it’s a yes so we don’t accidentally call, 911. But outside of that, you know, if I get less than ten percent of my population saying that we’re okay, that phone call is going out automatically.
Mike Hanson
I love that and, you know, let’s let’s operate in the world of reasonableness.
You know, the fact that it’s going straight to 911 is already saving seconds. Gone is the idea of finding your phone, entering the code, finding the app to alert, none of that. This goes right to 911, and the cavalry is coming if this is big one. And those extra seconds that you are saving are priceless. It’s invaluable.
Let’s say it is a false alarm.
If we operate in this world of reasonableness, your local law enforcement is going to understand it. It’s not the end of the world that they raced there to get there, and it was a false alarm. That’s fine. I think where the issue people run into is they’re worried about the false alarm.
We’re gonna operate under the guise of being reasonable here, and if it’s a pattern, if it’s happening monthly or twice a week or something, then I think the administrators from your local law enforcement are gonna talk to you about, hey. What buttons are being pushed? How can we get through this so we don’t keep repeating the false alarm? But if it’s a one off every so many years, not a big deal.
We can get through it. And, that’s the reasonableness that we need to operate under, between law enforcement and schools because so much is at stake.
Jay Grossman
And Mike, to that point, I think that’s where that communication piece is so important. Know, by sending out our notification twenty four hours ahead of time, our law enforcement know, okay, there’s a drill happening at this building. And so if something does happen and we miss that and the call does go out to 911, like you said, once, twice, it is forgiven. In fact, I’m our district is guilty of running a drill, and we didn’t send that communication out at that point, and they did come with lights flashing. And it was okay. I it was understood. But in our debrief, we figured out, alright.
How do we prevent this from happening again? How do we make sure that, you know, we’re not having them come when it shouldn’t be so that, you know, if you do it too many times, then, like I said, it’s gonna be the district that cried wolf, and they’re just going to think it’s another false alarm, and it might actually be the event. So that’s where that communication is really important, and that’s just as simple as making sure you have the right people on an email list and sending that email out ahead of time so everybody is aware of it.
Chris Swietlik
As we get to the end of our time here, I wanna remind people that they can submit questions into the chat, and we will work on answering those. I know our team members have been responding to some of those more technical questions related to our InformaCast platform as they’ve come in.
But if you have other questions about anything that we’ve discussed, or need further advice, please submit those, and we’ll try and get to those before the end of our time today. I think as we wrap up, Pat, when we talk about the standard response protocol and what schools need to do to implement something like this, I talked a little bit earlier on that, you know, there can be hesitation to try new things. Some of that might be due to limited resources, limited time, and really just the investment that people need to do to do new training.
What are some good ways that the attendees on this call, if they’re interested in the SRP, that they can take some practical steps to not bite too much off all at one time, but still build to that effective response that they’re looking for.
Pat Hamilton
You know, the first thing, and this is another shameless plug for iloveyouguys.org, is go to the website and poke around and see if it works for you. And if it does, take it. It’s yours and it’s available at no cost.
And if you really like it, let us know you’re using it. That’d be great. And then the other thing I do, Mike has talked about this, Jay’s talked about this, about the relationships that they have with the schools and their community. It’s such an important part of our community to have our schools be safe. I mean, what’s going on in our schools is a microcosm of what’s happening in our communities. And so if we work together, we can, whatever we do in our schools can typically, and might even just go out into the community as well. So I would say start with the relationships.
Look around. If you decide you wanna do SRP, don’t do it independently.
Make sure you have a conversation with your first responders. And that can start with something as simple as a cup of coffee. Just go out and buy a cup of coffee or buy a lunch. I’ve had so many conversations that led to much bigger things just by going and buying someone, you know, what used to be a four dollars cup of coffee, I think it’s seven dollars or eight dollars now, but whatever, you can do that. Typically, even if you have to do that in your own pocket like I did in my district, those were always great conversations and a one hour conversation could turn into a lifetime of working together. And that’s what I’ve heard Jay and Mike talking about is like, these are ongoing relationships once you’ve established this. And then, you just start with maybe you’ve got, you know, a protocol in place and you’re thinking about bringing this in on top of an all-hazards approach to your school.
Start with just the five actions. It’s very easy, it’s not complicated, it’s a good place to start. You can get to reunification after you’ve got your hands around, hey, this is how we’re gonna have that initial response to protect our students, keep our students safe. Then we have to start talking about what reunification is gonna look like as well, because there is a point where after that we’re gonna have to reunify students and parents together. There’s a custodial exchange that happens between us and a parent. So let’s start with the SRP, start with buying someone a cup of coffee, pick up the phone, give them a call. It goes a long way.
Jay Grossman
Yeah, some of the other things, you know, just, again, from the school perspective of it, as I mentioned before, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Take inventory of what you’ve already got. See what sort of technologies you already have in place in your building and how you might be able to incorporate InformaCast into it. As I mentioned, you know, I didn’t have to redo all of our PA speakers. We used a simple device called a zone controller, and that was able to tie InformaCast right into all of my existing PA speakers, which I already knew got to everyone.
You know, another thing that we looked at as we’ve been building up our system is there are grants, there are funding grant opportunities to help curb the cost of bringing in some of the other technology into here and getting that in place.
And then there’s trainings. We did not know about I Love You Guys as an SRP until the other year when myself and a couple others on our district safety team were at, an event, and, I Love You Guys was one of the topics that was brought up. And then all of a sudden, it was like this moment of here we go. This is what this was the missing piece of what we’re looking for. Here’s the script that we need. Here’s the protocol. Here’s how we do the reunification, and get the message out to everybody.
It was written there in a book for us. We knew that, the Michigan State Police have adopted it as well at that point. And, you know, we just would, to us, it just made sense to incorporate this into the systems we were already doing.
Ryan Mauer
Yeah. Think from my perspective, you know, from the Singlewire InformaCast perspective, we think extremely highly about the I Love You Guys protocols.
Jay, you mentioned putting the icons, message template scenarios into InformaCast so that you can execute the protocols, both on prem and then with your community.
And so if and when we can support folks looking to execute that or deploy it, we want to do that so that folks like myself who are actually on the receiving end of that message sets in scenarios like I referenced before, we’re more than happy to do that. We want to make that available anybody that’s, interested.
Chris Swietlik
I think that’s a great place to wrap up, Ryan. I wanna thank Mike, Pat, Jay, and Ryan for sharing their insights with us today and for everyone who attended the webinar. As Ryan just said, Jay, Pat also mentioned, Singlewire Software is a proud mission partner of the I Love You Guys Foundation. We do utilize the standard response protocol icons and terminology within our software.
So if you’re an existing InformaCast customer, those are available to you. I also wanna say if you enjoyed the content that we shared with you today, we had a previous webinar with Pat, and I Love You Guys, going over their standard reunification method, which is available on demand that you can check out as well. And if you’re interested in learning more about what Jay has done with our software, we also have a full video case study about how his district implemented our solutions.
With that, a reminder that this will be sent out. I know we got that question in the chat. So once the recording has ended, we will be following up with a link where you can view this on demand if you’d like to review anything we’ve gone over today or share this with colleagues.
And I think with that, we will close out. So thank everyone again for your time and joining us, and we wish everyone a good afternoon.
Pat Hamilton
Thank you all.