Building the Connected Safety Ecosystem

Thanks everyone for being here.

Sorry for the delay.

Um, we have Marshall Singer here with presenting for us.

Anything else? Hi folks.

And, and Andre, I thank you so much.

Uh, it's my pleasure to be here.

Uh, you know, we've had the, the pleasure really of working with Atlas for God almost eight years now.

And, and everything we do together is just proven to be just so impactful and so meaningful for the independent school community.

So just, just wonderful to be here.

And, and today I'm gonna be talking about a topic I think is incredibly salient in this moment, which is, you know, as an independent school director, uh, of technology, how do you build a connected safety e ecosystem? Because I think it's now more than ever incredibly important to think about, especially with recent events and as the role of, uh, a director of technology really just expands.

So a little bit of background.

Uh, my name is Marshall Singer.

I'm one of the co-founders and, uh, the COO here at Aruba.

You can see there my co-founders, Joey Naski and, and Jack Rupple.

Um, and we started the company back in 2016 when I was, uh, quite a bit younger, had a little less gray hair.

Um, and our goal was simple.

It was to help schools quickly, safely and accurately understand what student was safe, what students were safe, what students were missing, and what students need help.

And we've really grown quite a bit since then.

But that core mission of helping schools solve difficult challenges remains the same.

And I think that really equips us, uh, well, to understand what's happening here and provide insights for you all because the role of the director of technology has changed.

You are now integral members of the safety decision making and safety supporting process.

You are going to be part of those decisions and that prevents both challenges, but also opportunities.

And I'm excited to talk today about how you can make the most of that to make a meaningful difference for your community.

Before we get into that, let's talk about what you're more than likely walking into, because I'm sure you've all seen this and I'm sure everyone has experienced something like this, which is that you are walking into a disconnected world.

Places where you might have access control from one vendor, cameras from another communication through a phone tree that you have to call under a password visitor management.

That is really just a piece of paper.

And, uh, since you use Blackbaud, the ability to use all of your data, but it might not be going anywhere, or sorry, you use Blackbaud or CROs, the ability for it to go, you know, somewhere but not go anywhere.

And here's what that means.

It means that the process of initiating an event of understanding, you know, the entire community who's safe, it takes a while.

'cause you've gotta alert folks based over a pa.

You've got a key in that lock code.

You've gotta get first responders on the way, then take attendance, then have people compile that attendance, have parents communicated to then maybe come if they need to, to then understand what's going on.

It takes a while, it takes 15 to 30 minutes and it's rife with chances for manual errors and delayed communication.

And so as a technology leader, you're called in usually to answer, what can we do? How can we fix this? Because when you have all these disconnected pieces, you're never gonna be successful.

And as Ross here, the the principal for operations at, at Salisbury Christian School says, it requires all of your stakeholders, including your parents, to understand and know the procedure.

And that doesn't mean just having different tools.

It means knowing how to use them, knowing how to leverage them.

And the siloed problem creates dangerous gaps because you're manually relying on starting systems.

You're not having things that speak to each other and staff aren't able to instantly understand what's happening and get information out to the rest of the community.

Really, you're stuck balancing safety efficiency in school culture in a way that's working for no one.

So what can we do about this? How can we improve? Well, I think the first thing we need to do as a community is rethink how we look at ecosystems.

Because I know a lot of the times in the technology space, you know, we think of an ecosystem and we think just about the technology, what systems am I gonna buy? What platforms can I bring on, on board here? But I think it would behoove us all sometimes to take a step back and say, an ecosystem involves many parts.

And I think the most important one of those is people.

So it's understanding that technology integration really only works when people are fully on board.

So let's take a step here and think about what every part of the pie here needs.

Staff need to understand what's going on.

They need to understand exactly when the emergency starts.

They need to understand who's safe, and they have to have clear processes for understanding and sharing.

All of that, students need to be able to know exactly where to go.

They need the ability to be contacted in the case of an emergency if they're not with a teacher.

And most importantly, they need to trust that the school has their back.

Parents need transparent communication when ready and they need to trust that their students are well looked after.

And first responders need direct ability to understand what's happening, where it's happening and when it's happening.

And all these things just kind of need to work because each one of these stakeholders is a critical member of our community.

So as we go from people to processes and systems, how can we start thinking about them? Well, the easiest way to do that is to start small with big ideas.

What do I mean by that? I mean, think about what data go where data goes, not what it does.

And think about your stakeholders and what they need.

What are your end results? What are we really trying to achieve here? Because if the goal here is be safer, well that can mean a lot of different things or notify our students.

Well, what does that accomplish? So engage those stakeholders before you go out to market, before you start thinking about what to buy.

Because a lot of the times simpler is a lot better.

Understand the expectations you have with them because you know, a system is only as good as its ability to integrate with what you're doing right now.

So what you really wanna understand is not what the system does, but how it leverages what you already have to accomplish that.

And understand how you can use your existing stack in ways you might not be doing already.

Because it's always amazing if you don't even need to buy anything.

Or you can only buy one thing to integrate a lot of different pieces instead of needing to buy five things to do the same function.

And I think most importantly, it's having an always getting ready mindset instead of thinking in terms of we're going back to school now, it's time to make changes.

I think the mindset really needs to be, what can I be doing now? You know, use that systems, that technology leader approach of always improving, iterating and doing better.

We want to be always ongoing, uh, testing of our systems connections and understanding, okay, how could we do more? We wanna be working with our stakeholders because again, just like now you're a safe stakeholder in safety, work with the rest of them.

What are they doing? How are they keeping people up to date and are they getting the most from the systems we've installed? And then continuously optimizing based on how we're actually using things.

You know, if your system isn't providing you data or background to understand how you can use it and be safer, you know, maybe you need to think of something else.

And, uh, I think the biggest thing that we don't see a lot of schools do is doing an ecosystem map.

What I mean by that is understanding, okay, when I use this system, what are the other systems I have to use? Because at the end of the day, and I'll talk about this in my next slide, it's about how we can leverage one thing to make many things happen.

And as Terry Williams, um, very wonderfully said, especially when we think about this getting ready approach, it's for us, it literally never stop.

And there's no such thing as getting ready for the next year.

She's always getting ready, she's always ready.

And I think that's really a great perspective to have.

And we begin when we begin to think about, you know, how we can use one thing to accomplish many tasks.

I'll use Una as an example here.

Unlike that 11 step process we were talking about earlier with Rena, it's three you indicate when an event happens.

And that from there causes a cascade of other important things to happen from 9 1 1 automatically being dialed to doors, being locked to PAs, calling out a notification to digital signage, showing alerts to those who needs it.

The connected ecosystem both connects to your technology in the ways I've just talked about, but it also enables your people.

And that's because when the event starts, teachers are immediately given a a roster.

They're shown who they need to check in, they're able to communicate, they got that information, they need administrators get a bird's eye dashboard knowing what's going on.

Students can be directly communicated if needed and when it's ready to happen, parents can get that important up to date information.

So we're able with a system like r and a connected ecosystem to get full accountability in minutes, reducing errors and providing that instant communication everyone needs.

And so how do we go from, you know, where we are today or well, what's whatever step we are on that pathway to where we want to be? So this is, uh, what I like to call an ecosystem blueprint.

And it's four different phases that can allow you to get from not having the system you might want or an ecosystem that isn't as connected as you might imagine, to something that's gonna provide you with safety benefits and communication for the future.

Step one is start with your rocks, the things that you need to use every day, your communication platform and your SIS integrations.

What are you leveraging right now? Is your data going to all the systems? It could? And how are you using that communication system to improve response during an emergency? Do you have groups flowing? Do you have your attendance information in there? Can you account for students important questions there? If you can do that, then we can go onto your core connections, as I like to call them, your visitor management to better supplement, Hey, who's actually on campus right now? And B, your connection to 9 1 1.

Because during an emergency, every moment matters.

And not needing to manually text or dial is critically important.

So automating both of those processes is very powerful.

Now we look at our more advanced components.

Can we connect surveillance and instrument documentation systems so all this information is viewable and up to date in real time.

Then from there, can we have our cameras automatically tagging, okay, hey, this is when the emergency happened, so we're going back and reviewing this.

And when we are going back and reviewing, we don't need to scroll through different footage, it'll automatically be tagged there.

And once we've got that in place, it's about that optimization, a continuous refinement and understanding from your stakeholders what's working, how it's working, and where it could be better.

And then the important question there is, is this right for your school? And what part of this makes sense, sense to implement? Well, the answer, at least we believe in ruen is that this is right for every school.

Every school needs to have the ability to quickly, safely, and accurately understand what students are safe, what students need help, what students are missing, and most importantly needs a full ecosystem that allows them to understand all of those things, communicates that out and reduces steps, provides time back for learning, makes it easier to understand who's safe and overall gets people back to what they should be doing, focusing on their students.

And with that, I'm gonna open it up to questions.

All right.

It looks like we don't have any questions.

I think we can, um, stop the recording there and we can share this with everyone on..