Staff at Apalachee High School have only worn badges for about a week that can quickly alert school officials or first responders about emergencies with a few clicks of a button.
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.
Georgia lawmakers failed to approve legislation this year that would require public schools to install panic alarms to silently notify law enforcement of threats. It’s called Alyssa’s Law, and has passed in several states.
Despite this, more than half of Georgia’s schools — including many in metro Atlanta — 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% — 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% 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 campuswide 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.”
Clayton County Public Schools Superintendent Anthony W. Smith said in an interview that the Centegix system has been a valuable resource for staff.
“It’s been a Godsend,” he said. “It’s given our staff members a degree of security like they never had before.”
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