Ohio district deploys SchoolSAFE solution invented by Motorola dealer

Hanlon said school-district personnel have embraced the SchoolSAFE concept, which the district plans to incorporate in emergency-incident drills in the future. In addition, the school district is gaining practical experience with the system in situations that tend to happen in a school environment, with Hanlon providing a hypothetical scenario of a student suffering a broken arm in gym class.

“Now, that [school-district] first responder on the scene can be relating exactly what’s happening with the student [in discussions with public-safety personnel],” Hanlon said. “Is this a compound fracture that we’re dealing with? Is the child unconscious? We can be controlling the flow of information much more accurately than having a secretary in the office say, ‘All I know is that somebody’s hurt in the gym.’”

QDS Communications has deployed the solution in about 200 facilities near its Colorado locations, but officials for Motorola Solutions wanted to learn what it would take to install the system in another part of the country. The 10-school Chardon Local Schools was selected, and SchoolSAFE was deployed at no cost to the district.

“It’s a pilot, not in terms of the technology but in terms of Motorola understanding what needs to be wrapped around this solution to implement it—the training and so on—so that we could help QDS package this up, so that we could provide it to our dealer channel,” Gray said. “That was the entire intent here.”

While the current SchoolSAFE solution provides a communication bridge between P25 and MOTOTRBO networks, Motorola Solutions’ recent acquisition of Twisted Pair could allow an expanded method of interoperability in the future, Gray said.

“Now, with the acquisition of Twisted Pair—and we’ve talked about this with Chardon—you can actually take an Android or an Apple cell phone and put it in this same environment,” he said.

Gray said the SchoolSAFE solution will be featured at the Motorola Solutions Channel Partner Expo that will be conducted in Las Vegas on the eve of the IWCE 2014 exhibit hall opening.