On Wednesday, the badges were used by school workers and are being credited by law enforcement officials for helping authorities arrive quickly at Apalachee High to respond to the school shooting.
“All of our teachers are armed with a form of an ID called Centegix. And Centegix alarms us and alerts the law enforcement office after the buttons are pressed,” Barrow County Sheriff Jud Smith told reporters during a news conference Wednesday night.
About 60 percent of schools statewide have contracts with Centegix, a company based in metro Atlanta. Centegix charges roughly $8,000 per school per year for its system, which includes the badges, other equipment and software.
The system has two types of alerts that are triggered based on the number of times a user pushes a button. General alerts for medical help, intervention with a student or other situations send a signal to the school district’s central office along with computers and smartphones connected to the system. Emergency alerts trigger flashing lights and a lockdown message that plays throughout the campus.
Apalachee High students reported seeing screens in their classrooms change to say “lockdown” before hearing gunshots on Wednesday.
The vast majority of the approximately 50,000 alerts issued nationwide in fall 2022 — upward of 98 percent — only went to school personnel. Most uses of the badges were related to student behavior or medical emergencies, the company previously told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Inadvertent presses of the badges accounted for roughly 10 percent of the alerts in Cherokee, Fayette and Henry counties. The company’s 2022 report does not include information about accidental alerts.
“When we talk now about the platform, we call the campus-wide emergency program more of an insurance policy,” Centegix CEO Brent Cobb said. “It’s not going to be used very often — but when you need it, it’s by far in the industry the best solution.”
©2024 The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
