DENVER — As school districts look for ways to keep their classrooms safe for students and staff, many are turning to technology.

Denver Public Schools (DPS) has rolled out the first phase of CrisisGo to help the district improve communication when responding to emergencies. The company provides schools with advanced alerting software and other tools to streamline a school district’s response to incidents.

Kip Sixbery, DPS emergency manager, sees the benefits of staying current by implementing technology in his department.

“After every critical incident that happens in the district, we do a debrief with the school. We want to get a perspective from the school’s perspective on how that critical incident unfolded, how it was handled it and how we handled it as a security service,” Sixbery said.

Sixbery noted that communication was the number one issue when debriefing after a critical incident. Schools wanted better communication and access to information during an incident, not just before and after.

“If you think about the life cycle of a containment or security perimeter, it could take minutes or hours. Now imagine you are a teacher or student inside a classroom and that you were informed at the beginning of an incident and then not until the very end,” Sixbery said.

Before CrisisGo, staff and students had no secure way to communicate effectively with school security officers. Additionally, the DPS dispatch center had to individually notify each surrounding school and department within a 1.5 mile radius of the incident.

Denver Public Schools adds new technology to improve communication during school crisis responses

Anyone with access to CrisisGo can immediately send an alert to everyone in the school community with the press of a button, speeding up response time. A loud notification will play on mobile devices before going silent after 20 seconds.

“Once the incident starts, there’s a lot of commotion in the building. We have public address announcements. We have the CrisisGo app (which) makes us make a loud noise at the start of an incident. But after that, everything is silent to us,” Sixbery said.

When an alert is received, each CrisisGo member can use the app or click a link to start messaging with school safety officers, students, staff and parents.

In an emergency, Sixbery said this method will help first responders focus on allocating resources and provide some relief to those involved in the incident.

“For these incidents in the district, it is critical to be able to gather information from as many sources as possible to ensure the effectiveness and manner in which we operate in response to this incident,” Sixbery said. “With this two-way communication feature, the people involved in the incident, the people who locked down the building, can give us direct knowledge of what’s happening in that building. And that allows us to more easily allocate resources to a certain part of the building.

In the first phase of this deployment, only school staff will have access to the CrisisGo application. DPS plans to add students and parents in the future.