Centegix's CrisisAlert is a wearable device meant to swiftly alert authorities of emergencies.
Dr. Roderick Sams began his career in education as I did many moons ago: as a classroom paraprofessional (the professional term for teacher’s aide).
Now chief development officer at educational tech company Centegix, the former teacher and principal from Waynesboro, Georgia transitioned in 2010 to begin a career working at educational technology companies and education-oriented non-profit organizations. He joined Centegix in January of last year due to a desire to expand his ideas on supporting education by incorporating safety into his ethos.
“In my opinion, safer schools are better schools,” Dr. Sams said to me in an interview late last month conducted over email. “The relationship between school climate and safety defines in significant detail what work is needed to promote improved performance for teachers and students. Improving school safety should have a positive effect on improved school performance.”
Centegix describes its mission on its website as “creating safer spaces by innovating technology to empower and protect people.” The company’s bread-and-butter in the educational realm is their CrisisAlert system. The CrisisAlert products involves two parts, hardware and software. The hardware is a badge-like wearable that operates in a similar fashion to how medical alert devices do for elderly people. Click the badge, which works both indoors and outdoors, eight times and it will notify law enforcement and other emergency services of a situation on a school campus. Likewise, the CrisisAlert badge has a companion app that allows the same notifications, but will do the same for the school to let students and staff shelter-in-place in the event of an active shooter, for example.
In addition, CrisisAlert can be used in decidedly less life-threatening circumstances, such as providing alerts during times of severe weather.
Along with marketing towards schools, Centegix also pitches CrisisAlert as useful in other settings like hospitals, hotels, and more. The company boasts it pushed more than 80,000 alerts last year, as well as being deployed in over 4,000 locations. Over 5 million people have been protected, Centegix says.
Centegix has a video explaining CrisisAlert on its YouTube channel.
According to Dr. Sams, Centegix was founded “in response to concerns that traditional safety alert programs didn’t reflect the realities of the classroom or draw on the best technologies for moments of crisis.” One of the CrisisAlert’s benefits is it shortens the time needed to contact first responders. Time is of the essence during emergencies, and Centegix believes its product is more efficient and reliable during times of crisis than conventional means of communication.
“After the tragic shooting in Parkland, our founder [Daniel Dooley] realized the limitation of emergency response systems in the market and wanted something better,” Dr. Sams said. “The products that existed did not include audio or visual notifications with their systems. Location accuracy relied on GPS and not actual maps of their locations. Challenges with Wi-Fi or cellular coverage in many schools add to the challenges of notifying everyone in real time of an emergency with reliance on that technology. We learned from each of these deficiencies to create a more effective, reliable system that can respond during any emergency.”
School districts, Dr. Sams told me, have shared positive feedback with the company on CrisisAlert. The majority of the feedback has centered around medical emergencies involving both staff and students, with districts applauding CrisisAlert for the easily accessible operation when a situation arises. Furthermore, the learning curve is short, which means schools have dedicated to less time with trainings and management of the device. “District leaders have shared the value of alert data they receive and how it supports their decisions, whether it’s how resources are equitably distributed or how school and classroom needs are addressed,” Dr. Sams said of CrisisAlert’s reception. “It’s great to know that the desired result you hoped to achieve is as close to being achieved.”
As to the future for Centegix, Dr. Sams declined to get into specifics regarding the company’s product roadmap, saying only the team has “several developments underway that will strengthen CrisisAlert for the future” that are designed to “enhance the user experience and improve our already solid performance.” He added Centegix is working with other organizations in an effort to create a “more integrated and inclusive safety ecosystem for school districts.”
“Our goal is to support creating safer spaces, and we are willing to partner with other like-minded organizations with a similar vision,” Dr. Sams said.
