Recent school shootings around the country prompted Montgomery County commissioners to wonder how they could help protect youngsters at school.
Their answer: panic buttons.
Yesterday, the commissioners announced an initiative to put silent panic alarms tied into the 911 dispatch center in the more than 650 schools - public, private, parochial and nursery - throughout the county.
"The key advantage to this is that it will take no more than a button press," said Sean Petty, the county's deputy director of public safety for technology and the developer of the new system.
The Countywide Law enforcement Alerting and Safety System - or CLASS - and the cooperative effort between the local government and the schools may be first-of-a-kind approaches.
"This may be carving out some new territory," Ron Stephens, director of the National School Safety Center in California, said in an interview yesterday. The system might "represent a new high-water mark for rapid response in school safety," he said.
Petty, an electrical engineer, said the system would look and act like a bank teller panic alarm and would use the Internet to carry the alarm from the schools to the emergency dispatch.
The buttons could be stationary or wireless transmitters carried around by school officials, or just a set of keyboard punches on a computer, Petty said.
"It is a simple idea but a terrific idea," said Tom Sullivan, director of public safety for Montgomery County.
The initial cost for one button per school would be $1,000, or about $650,000 for the entire county. Additional engineering costs will bring the total cost of the project to about $1 million and will be funded through the county's capital budget. The county hopes to recoup some costs later with federal and state grants.
A panic button system is currently in use in the Montgomery County district judges' offices and is tied in to local police stations.
The county hopes to have the system installed in the schools by the fall of 2007.
Each school would determine how many "panic buttons" it would need and who would have access.
In an emergency, school staff "may not be able to access cell phones," Sullivan said, and the panic buttons would cut down on the minutes it takes to activate an emergency response because they would link directly to dispatchers.
"We believe we will be able to link all these technologies together," Petty said. The CLASS system will be designed to integrate with the county's computer-aided dispatch system and eventually computers in police cars, he said.
Stephens said that the speed of response to emergency situations in schools is critical and that violence is likely to take place in the first 10 minutes. "The reality is that schools don't have very long," he said.
Montgomery County is apparently taking the initiative in a state that does not require specific school safety measures.
State statute says only that "every school district, in cooperation with the local Emergency Management Agency, shall develop and implement emergency preparedness plans."
The state Education Department has an online checklist to guide districts in the crafting of their plans, and it provides technical assistance through an outside agency, said spokesman Mike Storm. The specifics are decided at the local level, he said.
"We don't have any formal authority to require school districts to file these plans with us, or to audit these plans," Storm said.
Kate Philips, spokeswoman for Gov. Rendell, said the state was "in the process of reviewing all of our school safety regulations."
The review started immediately after the recent school shootings, she said. There is no timetable set for when it will end, but Rendell will decide what changes are needed afterward, she said.
House Education Committee Chairman Jess M. Stairs (R., Westmoreland) said that his panel would have a hearing on school safety after the coming election.
A recent Inquirer article on school security breaches will be used as a "starting-off point," he said.
As a result of the Oct. 10 story - in which reporters told how they were able to get into about half of the 43 schools they visited, undetected and unmonitored - schools throughout the area were tweaking protocols and making sure doors could not be propped open.
In Philadelphia, officials ordered school police to begin making surprise security checks at schools around the district.
Montgomery County's action comes on the heels of a series of violent school incidents.
On Oct. 2, Charles Carl Roberts IV entered the West Nickel Mines Amish School in Lancaster County, killed five girls, and wounded five others before killing himself.
On Sept. 27, in Bailey, Colo., a man took six girls in a high school hostage, sexually assaulted them, and fatally shot one girl before killing himself. Two days later in Cazenovia, Wis., a 15-year-old student shot his principal after he was disciplined.
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