Databus Issue: 2003 3 07/15/2003
Striving for Increased School Safety with Wireless Communications
Ben Guderian Director of Marketing
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Schools today face many new challenges such as the serious need to improve school safety and security and the problems associated with rapid school growth.
One of the major issues schools are grappling with is improving communications among teachers, staff, students, administrators and security personnel. A teacher that is unable to react quickly and effectively to a minor problem could see it balloon into a major crisis. Should that teacher be cut off from the rest of the school in a temporary classroom, athletic field, or the parking lot, the problem is greatly exacerbated. Rapidly growing school districts have to deal with these problems while keeping within their strict, ever-tightening budgetary guidelines.
One effective way in which forward-thinking schools are improving communications within their campuses is by installing 802.11 wireless local area networks (LANs), also known as Wi-Fi. Although many schools deploy wireless networks initially to offer staff and students Internet access outside of fixed computer labs, they are now finding that they can inexpensively add wireless voice capabilities to that same wireless LAN. The result is that staff can carry lightweight wireless telephones that work in classrooms, parking lots, laboratories, lunchrooms, gymnasiums, auditoriums, athletic fields, locker rooms and anywhere else they need to be on campus.
Insuring school safety is priceless, but the cost of supplying teachers and staff with wireless telephones can actually be less than other communication alternatives such as pagers, walkie-talkies, voice intercom systems, cellular phones or even wired desktop or wall-mounted telephones.
Simplifying School Safety
The most intuitive tool for maintaining contact between school administrators and staff, security personnel and emergency medical teams continue to be the telephone. However, as simple as the telephone is, it is not necessarily cost-effective for schools to wire each classroom with a telephone, particularly when many schools continue to add portable classrooms in efforts to handle the growth in enrollment. Ironically, these portable classrooms are other located hundreds of feet from the main school facility and therefore call for additional safety measures.
Even if schools decided to incur the expense of wiring every classroom and portable annex with a traditional wired telephones, teachers constantly on the go still would have limited access to voice communications. If an emergency situation were to occur outside the classroom– such as a fall in a hallway, a choking incident in the lunchroom or a fight in the parking lot – a school employee would have to send for help or leave the scene of an emergency situation to summon immediate assistance.
For the very reason that safety concerns run the gamut from violence, theft, bullying, drugs, firearm concealment, sexual battery, physical attacks, theft/larceny, vandalism, falls, illnesses and other health urgencies, schools must equip teachers and staff with the fastest, simplest device to manage and contain emergencies.
Cost Effective Communications
Schools with plans to install a wireless LAN or that have an existing network in place can add voice capabilities to the network, thereby significantly increasing the return on their network investment. Using a wireless LAN eliminates the cost of running telephone and data cables to individual classrooms or workstations. There is still the cost of running cable to the wireless LAN access points and the cost of the access points themselves. But with access points selling for approximately $500 today, each access point pays for itself if it eliminates five or more individual cable runs. Also, an access point uses just one port off the Ethernet switch in the computer room, so there’s additional savings of approximately $50 to $100 per cabled connection replaced. So it’s easy to see the economies in using a shared wireless connection instead of permanently installing wiring.
Trumping All Other Options
Wireless telephones prove a more effective resolution to safety concerns than the existing communications systems schools have in place today. Intercom and paging systems disrupt the classroom and have a response wait time that can jeopardize student safety in an emergency. Student runners have limited access to key personnel and can cause delays and a host of miscommunication problems. Walkie-talkies or two-way radios are even noisier and more disruptive than traditional phones, do not provide privacy for the people communicating, and are unable to contact people outside of the school property. Cellular telephones incur airtime charges and often have dead-zones within school facilities such as cafeterias and auditoriums that disrupt communications.
Schools considering improved communications among teachers and staff would benefit in evaluating wireless telephone as a viable solution that can prove successful and cost effective.
An Educated Decision
A school should choose a vendor that can work with its existing telecommunications infrastructure, requiring less investment in new equipment and interoperating effectively with systems that are in place. By having a new wireless telephone system function with the school’s existing telecommunications system, wireless handsets retain the same functionality as wired telephones. Teachers and staff are able to call telephone extensions within the school to seek assistance or handle student inquiries as well as use the telephone for outside calls to 911 or to reach parents.
A wireless telephone can be one of the most effective tools schools can put into the hands of teachers and staff to increase student safety and improve communications with parents and teachers. With safety an ever-present concern on the nation’s agenda, providing teachers with a crucial lifeline to the school and outside world becomes a necessity, not a choice. Wireless telephones are proving to be the most cost-effective and intuitive answer to the ever-present issues facing students in schools.
Ben Guderian is director of Marketing for SpectraLink Corp. For more information about wireless telephones, please call (800) 676-5465 or visit www.spectralink.com. SpectraLink, headquartered in Boulder, Colo., has more installed systems, and more experience and application knowledge than any other provider.
