School safety and security is top of mind for the Vermilion Local Schools’ superintendent.
“[A school shooting is] your greatest fear as a school administrator,” Dr. David Hile said. “It has become something that happens very frequently in America and you don’t know when or how it’s going to happen and we have so many mental health issues.”
It’s one of the reasons the district was the first in Ohio to implement 911inform.
It can pinpoint where the emergency is happening and guide police, fire, or EMS, to the exact location, saving time.
“It really connects us very strongly to the first responders because the fact that the dispatcher in the 911 center can actually access the cameras, see what’s happening in the building, they could actually track the shooter through the building and then relay that information to the first responders as where to enter the building,” Hile said.
Not only can they pinpoint the exact location of where the 911 call came from, they can lock and unlock doors of the schools remotely.
The district has been doing monthly drills with the system at each of its schools.
“The drills are actually training the students, that’s how we train the students to respond so I think there’s been a lot positivity,” Hile said.
Thankfully, there haven’t been any real-life scenarios where the system has had to be used in Vermilion but the drills have allowed school leaders to address potential issues.
“We found that we need more strobes, we need more sirens because for example, the band area, they’re not able to hear the strobes that are in the hallways outside because they’re playing music at the time,” he said. “So we’ve identified areas where we’re going to implement additional strobes and sirens to make sure everybody can hear those things when it happens.”
They’ve also identified software glitches.
“When I clicked on the camera here in the high school it actually opened the camera in the middle school, there’s things like that, that we just have to work out some of the bugs but that’s why it’s important for us to use it when we do our drills.”
There is an annual monitoring fee for the district for 911inform.
Voters approved a safety and security levy that pays for that, a school resource officers, mental health therapist and more.
News 5 reached out to the company and received the following response:
“The 911inform team is in very frequent communication with Vermillion (sic), lending support and hearing
feedback on its daily use, and takes any reported issues very seriously.”
As for the camera glitch the company said when replicating the test there was no issue.
“Likely, this was due to user error, and we are following up to ensure it is not an issue with the technology.”
