Montgomery County, PA

 

NORRISTOWN — The Montgomery County Commissioners announced Thursday a major initiative to place a silent panic alarm in every public, private, parochial and nursery school in the county.

 

The alarm will give school personnel a means to communicate the critical information that an emergency is occurring in a discrete fashion and not place themselves or others in further danger.

 

Activation of an alarm will immediately alert a dispatcher in the County’s 9-1-1 Emergency Dispatch Center that a critical incident of some type is occurring at that location.

 

The dispatcher can then immediately contact police officers in that vicinity via radio, mobile data computer or pager and other text-enabled devices.

 

“This isn’t a panacea to school violence,” Montgomery County Commissioners Chairman Thomas Jay Ellis said.

 

“But it is another tool that we can use to help protect our children,” he said. “The amount of time it takes for law enforcement to respond to an incident can literally mean the difference between whether lives are saved or lost.

 

“Public safety is the cornerstone of this administration,” Ellis said. “We must protect our most precious resource, our children.”

This system, the Countywide Law enforcement Alerting and Safety System (CLASS), will have a number of advantages over traditional alarm systems. It won’t require the signal be received by a private alarm company and then relayed to the 9-1-1 Center via telephone.

 

CLASS will also be developed with the intention of expanding its capabilities in the future to include things such as body-worn wireless transmitters that principals or designated administrators could wear on their body.

 

It can also be developed into a Personal Computer-based system that will have the capability of two-way text communications and a printer in lieu of a monitor to maintain messages in hard-copy format. A light-and-buzzer system could be added to draw attention to alerts, particularly of impending severe weather, the need to evacuate or the need to lock down an installation because of a nearby incident.

 

The County will need to install approximately 660 of the devices to cover every school and nursery school within our borders.  It is estimated that it will cost about $1,000 to wire each school to the 9-1-1 dispatch center. There will be some additional engineering costs.

 

That works out to a per capita cost of just 88 cents for every resident of the County. To pay for the installations outright, the tax burden for a home assessed at the countywide average of $167,000 would be approximately $2.

 

There were discussions about pursuing grant funding, but the Commissioners decided it would take too long if they waited until they had lined up state or federal funding.

 

“School safety and the protection of our children are too important to us to delay this while we look for grants,” Ellis said.

 

“What would we tell the parents of a child who may be harmed in the meantime?,” he said. “We’ll pay for it and try to recoup the costs through grants later.”