Alyssa’s Law, panic buttons and school safety communication

9-minute read

What is Alyssa’s law, and how can communication enhance school safety plans?

Alyssa Alhadeff was 14 years old when she, with 16 others, lost her life in the 2018 shooting at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.

Lori Alhadeff, Alyssa’s mother, founded the nonprofit organization Make Our Schools Safe, dedicated to protecting students and teachers at school. She helped expedite legislation designed to accelerate law enforcement response to schools in a life-threatening emergency.

Alyssa’s law, first introduced in New Jersey in 2019, has been adopted in seven states and introduced in several others. Each state has a unique variation on the law. The legislation was introduced at the federal level in 2021 as Alyssa's Legacy Youth in Schools Safety Alert Act (the ALYSSA Act).¹

At the federal level, the bill requires K-12 schools to be equipped with at least one panic alarm or silent security system that can alert law enforcement about a life-threatening or emergency situation. It also increases funding for school resource officers.

Alyssa’s law has helped elevate visibility to the need to improve school safety and security. The ability to reach law enforcement quickly is imperative – and just one element of school safety. Make Our Schools Safe, for example, puts forth a multifaceted approach to school safety that puts Alyssas’s law into action and also incorporates preparedness, observation, response training and

knowledge of response protocols and drills.

Time equals life: addressing communication gaps and points of delay

A guiding principle of the Make Our Schools Safe approach is that time equals life. Because time is vital, school response protocols generally have two primary goals: to slow down the attacker, and speed up the response.

Speeding up the response is where we at Stryker turn our focus, because we have solutions that can help. Our Smartbadge is a unique device that’s like having a panic button, phone, two-way radio and PA system all in one small, hands-free wearable.

If a school has only one panic button that goes to law enforcement, it still needs to solve for enabling staff to communicate from anywhere on campus about an emergent crisis with the people who have access to that button.

Some schools have equipped staff with mobile panic buttons, which may come in the form of a small, wearable device, or a feature embedded in a smartphone app. When it comes to mobile panic buttons, a couple of key questions arise.

First, in a moment of threat, can a staff member reach the panic button not just quickly, but also discreetly, to help avoid escalating a situation? Second, what happens once the button is pressed?

Some panic buttons send a signal to 911 or a security team, providing no context about the situation. Responders must go investigate to find out what’s happening, creating a point of delay.

The Smartbadge has a dedicated panic button a staff member can discreetly press in a moment of distress to quickly reach an on-campus response or security team. The response team can see the person’s name and location, hear what’s happening and communicate directly with them if the situation allows. The response team can coordinate crisis communication across the campus and with authorities as needed, according to protocol. They can also communicate directly and broadly with teachers to take an action such as clear the halls, lock classroom doors, go into lockdown or follow other protocols.

Effective communication is two-way, accessible and intuitive

Just as employees need to be able to communicate with each other and on-campus administrators and response teams, school administrators and security personnel also need an effective, reliable way to communicate with staff in a crisis.

Reports following recent school shootings suggest that staff members faced barriers to communicating effectively. In one instance, radio failures caused communication delays and confusion that hindered authorities from coordinating a response.² In another example, someone called a Code Red that couldn’t reach people in the hallways or outdoors because there were no PA speakers in those places, while fire alarms led people to follow evacuation protocols that put them at risk.³

At another school, several district employees used the school’s emergency alert system via a smartphone app to send a lockdown alert during an active shooter incident.⁴ The problem was that employees didn’t reliably receive alerts from that system – for example, if their phones were turned off or stowed, or if they had to log in to a computer in order to see a notification. Further, the active shooter alerts weren’t differentiated from certain less-critical alerts staff had been receiving, so they didn’t respond to the active shooter alerts with appropriate urgency.

A communication device is of use in a crisis only if it’s with the user wherever they are on campus, and turned on. And notifications are of use only if they are accurate and meaningful to recipients.

Because the Smartbadge is designed to be worn, the device is likely to be at the ready in an emergency. There’s no need to retrieve a smartphone from a purse or drawer, log in and navigate to an app, all of which would insert more delay.

Hardwiring protocols into communication

With the Smartbadge, school administrators have control over how protocols will be hardwired. They can help ensure that notifications will be differentiated from one another and intuitive to the teachers, secretaries, support staff, SROs and maintenance team members who receive them. In this way, communication can become an enhancement to existing school safety plans.

Communicating about a concern before it becomes an emergency

Looking beyond crisis communication, staff in many schools lack a means of communicating quickly and directly about an issue of concern to help keep it from escalating into an emergency.

As described in an incident report detailing one recent shooting, a first-period teacher heard a student, who she didn’t know was carrying a rifle concealed in his backpack, talking about school shootings. The teacher communicated concern by sending an email to the suspect’s counselor, a communication method that didn’t give resource officers and law enforcement a chance to intercede.⁵

What if that teacher had been equipped with a way to communicate directly and discreetly with the counselor or a security response group to convey that concern?

Staff members can use the Smartbadge every day and in an emergency to communicate one-to-one and with specific user groups via voice calling or secure messaging, all without needing to know names or numbers. They can even use simple voice commands to initiate communication hands-free.

We’re here to help

Every school should be a secure and safe place where teachers and students can thrive.

Stryker is one of the world's leading medical technology companies. Alongside our customers around the world, we impact more than 150 million patients annually. We have a long history of helping healthcare teams with proven, reliable communication where lifesaving activities are critical. In the same way, we’re here to help schools empower staff to communicate quickly, broadly and effectively in a crisis, no matter the situation.

Visit stryker.com/school-safety to learn how our all-in-one communication and security solution can help you create a quieter environment for teaching and learning – and a communication hub for school safety and security.