School Employees Gain Ability To Report School Crisis

Every Oconee County School System employee–from the first-in-the-morning bus driver to the school superintendent–is now wearing an electronic alert system badge that can signal a school safety threat with three small taps of a button.

With the taps, the employee sends a signal to the school office and to the Oconee County Sheriff’s Office telling exactly who pushed the button and where that person is located.

At present, the system will be used only for the most extreme of circumstances calling for a lockdown of the school, but the system can be modified in the future to signal other emergencies.

“The tremendous benefit of this is that every employee is empowered to alert law enforcement,” according to Anisa Sullivan Jimenez, director of Communications for Oconee County Schools. “And they are empowered to alert them immediately.

“Response time is everything in a crisis, and this helps to shorten that response time,” Jimenez said on Friday when school officials demonstrated the system at Oconee County Middle School.

The alert system is operational at all 11 of the system’s schools, and the demonstration on Friday coincided with a drill at Oconee County Middle School–the first such drill at the 11 schools as the school year gets underway.

For more on this story, with a video of the demonstration session on Friday, please go to Oconee County Observations.