Two weeks after a deadly school shooting in Texas, Cobb County School District Superintendent Chris Ragsdale said Thursday that the district has switched to a new crisis alert system provider.
During prepared remarks at a Cobb Board of Education work session, Ragsdale also said each of the district’s 114 school campuses will have at least one unannounced Code Red drill during the 2022-23 school year to test the new system.
He added that the Cobb district is considering recruiting and training retired military, law enforcement, and other agents to serve as armed guards of schools and wants to hire more school psychologists to help students with mental health issues.
AlertPoint, which has been Cobb’s alert system vendor for the last five years, will be replaced by Centigex, which provides alert system technology for the educational sector and other industries.
Installation of the new system began in April and will be in place in all schools by Aug. 1, when the new school year begins in the Cobb district, according to Ragsdale, but he didn’t say why the district was making the change.
In February 2021 all high schools in Cobb were put on a brief Code Red lockdown. After initially saying it was due to a false alarm, the district said the incident was a deliberate cyber attack on the AlertPoint system and called in the Cobb Police Department to help investigate.
Centigex offers something similar to AlertPoint, what is called the CrisisAlert System, which is in place in several other school districts in metro Atlanta for what Ragsdale said is a “first level of security.”
In the Centigex system, teachers and staffers are equipped with wearable badges to report emergencies electronically via the push of a button, and that “instantly” alerts administrators and responders and triggers a lockdown in seconds.
On May 24, an 18-year-old boy in Uvalde, Texas shot his grandmother, then entered Robb Elementary School and fatally shot 19 students and two teachers before he was killed by a U.S. Border Patrol officer.
Ragsdale called the tragedy an “evil act,” and said that while “there’s no quick fix” and “you cannot ban evil,” the new alert system is part of the Cobb district’s enhanced objectives “to put in place all measures necessary to ensure the safety of our students and staff. Student safety has been, and continues to be, our number one priority.”
He said he could not publicly explain some of the procedures and protocols for security reasons, but told board members the matter could be discussed in executive session.
The district also has updated other safety information as part of its Cobb Shield safety and security program.
AlertPoint was installed in 2017 in several schools and then district-wide the following year. Cobb spent $5.3 million to purchase AlertPoint, and said all teachers and staff had been trained to use it.
But a survey conducted by Watching the Funds Cobb, a citizens group tracking Cobb school district spending, said more than 80 percent of respondents said they didn’t know how to use AlertPoint and hadn’t been trained on it.
When the subject came up at the work session, Ragsdale said that AlertPoint was “fully functioning” although not every staff member had a badge.
Board member Jaha Howard told Ragsdale he wanted to have trust in the new company, and Ragsdale directed him to the Centigex website.
The Centigex CrisisAlert Syterm also is installed in several hundred districts in Florida, which mandated such systems after the Parkland High School shootings left 17 people dead in 2018.
But Charlotte-Mecklenberg Schools, the largest district in North Carolina, dropped Centigex in 2020 when some features of the system weren’t reliable or working at all.
Ragsdale said after each school’s Code Red drill, district officials will brief school administrators to improve crisis preparedness.
“That does not mean that we will show up and issue a code red without announcing it is a drill,” he said.
The idea of arming teachers, however, is something Ragsdale said he isn’t entertaining: “We’re asking teachers to do too much already.”
At the board’s Thursday night business meeting, several speakers demanding more security measures wore orange shirts saying “We Demand Safer Schools Now!”
Some were not satisfied with what Ragsdale had announced, and called for the district to resume the suspended “No Place for Hate” and other bias training programs, and to do more for students with mental health issues.
One of the speakers, parent Jenny Peterson, said “how can you fix what’s broken if you don’t identify it? Be leaders!”
The Cobb school district said it will be seeking to use money Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) Fund, passed by Congress in 2020, to help pay for some of the additional security measures.
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