Keeping Schools Safe: How Better Tech Helps Officers Protect Students

A shift in mindset

Brendel has a unique perspective when it comes to securing schools. He became a school resource officer in 1999 as a member of the Erlanger Police Department in Kentucky and was one of the first eight SROs in the state. He was a founding member of the Kentucky Association of School Resource Officers and an instructor for the National Association of School Resource Officers (NASRO). In 2010, however, he was told that if he wanted to be promoted within the agency, he would have to go back to patrol. That decision led Brendel to a meteoric rise up the department’s ranks, and he retired in 2020 as police chief. His plan was to stay retired and spend time with his family, but he received a call from a friend asking him if he wanted to be an SRO again. For the last two school years, he has been at the DISD, reacquainting himself with with the environment of a school campus after more than a decade away.

When he was an SRO in the early 2000s, he helped deploy Raptor’s product suite into the schools he worked at. After joining the DISD, he discovered that they also used Raptor’s products and he wondered what had changed since he had been gone. “It has changed a lot, but there’s still a lot of similarities where I could just get right back into it,” he said. Since joining, he’s used Raptor Alert, along with tools that assist with visitor and student tracking.

“I’ve been doing this for a little while. It’s changed over the years from when we were first SROs to what we can do now,” he says. “There’s a little bit of a difference on the police part of it, but it's still building relationships, and that’s probably the biggest objective of this job.”

Rogers believes there has been a shift when it comes to both training and the jobs of school resource officers in general. “It used to be that the SRO was the old patrol cop they were putting out the pasture, but was not necessarily trained to deal with kids. Organizations like NASRO have done a fantastic job of coming in and offering classes and training around dealing with students and mental health,” he says. “An SRO is not just law enforcement on the campus, they’re a counselor, they are a coach. They are there on the front lines of detecting some of these mental health issues that we’ve seen post-COVID. Your first action as an SRO is not necessarily a law enforcement action. You’re not there to try to arrest the kid. You are there trying to make sure that this kid has the best outcomes.”

The need for technology

Rogers says that currently, there is a lot more technology for school districts available out in the marketplace than ever before. “There’s very cost-effective capabilities software that tries to enhance what the officer and the school staff are doing,” he notes. “It helps enable communication around the campus and facilitate information sharing. It helps on the back end to do behavioral threat assessments and being able to gather that information.”

Through the use of Raptor’s Panic Alert Technology, he says that officers and staff have the capability not only to make everybody aware on a campus of a major emergency, but to also get contextual information around what is going on and be able to have an open line of communication through the chat function between the officers and staff members.

“If you’ve got to fight in the hallway, a teacher is able to hit the team assist button on our Panic Alert software, report the fight and location and an SRO is able to address it and go there quickly,” he says. “In the case of a lockdown and the SRO is working with first responders to sweep the school, you’ve got all of that contextual information and that communication going back and forth with staff. That’s like a secure channel, and with capabilities that we get from Rapid SOS, we’re able to have a secure chat with the 911 dispatcher as well.”

Before the Columbine High School massacre in Colorado in 1999, Brendel says school security was much different. “We were just a school,” he says. “Everybody came in as a community. There was no big deal with who came through the door. That’s the way it was growing up. After that occurred, we started having to come up with active shooter plans and those have changed over the years.”

As the need for security grew, so did the technology. Access control devices and software solutions helped school districts fill that gap and that process continues today. Brendel says his school district is currently in the process of upgrading its cameras to support artificial intelligence software with the ability to track people by the color of their shirt or their hair color. “Those are all big things for us that benefit the school and keep us safe.” He notes, however, “You can have all that technology you want, but it’s us, the people—the staff, the students. If you don’t get the staff to buy in, it doesn’t matter what we put in place, how much technology we use, it ain’t going to work,” stressing that it’s also important to get buy-in from the students themselves. “If you can get it, that buy in, and build those relationships with them to where they’re coming to you directly, that’s huge.”

Adding tools

Rogers says that something Raptor has brought to the market and expanded on is the concept of visitor management. “It used to be you would just scan in visitors and make sure they’re not on the sex offender list coming into your school and you were able to check them in and check them out,” he says. “That technology has been around for 20 years. We’ve really expanded that capability to sort of start going beyond the campus.” VisitorSafe focuses on large-scale events in order for staff and SROs to track attendees. “If you have an emergency at a football game, you now know everybody who was there. If you have to do a reunification, and you’ve got 50 kids that were dropped off by their parents and there was a shooting, you’re able to identify them and go into reunification mode on the backend and get them reunified with their parents. From the investigative mode, you know, everybody who was there. You have if they were in assigned seating, if they were in general seating. You know, everybody who was at that football game.”

He says the feedback from SROs has been positive because they currently don’t know who’s coming through the gate and ticket sales software used by the schools is not linked back to the applications that they use for visitor management.

Raptor Technologies also has launched a product called StudentsSafe. Not only does it help conduct behavioral threat assessments, it allows school districts to have more a customized model. If faculty and staff observe something going on with a student, whether it be bullying or the bus driver notices that they don’t want to get off the bus to go home, those details can be logged into the system. “Now, the counselor can connect the dots. If it’s a behavioral issue, you’re able to document all of that information and provide it to the SRO,” he says. “We now have a tool that allows you to get ahead of a lot of the problems.”

According to Rogers, SROs can input the information into the system as well, allowing for a record of the student’s history to be recorded. “You have this whole chronology of this kid from elementary to junior high to high school of what went on in their life and what has been noticed along the way,” he says. “That can inform the behavioral threat assessment.”