Belleville, IL, High School Teachers to Wear Panic Buttons

Oct. 23—In an effort to boost school safety, Belleville Township High School District 201 employees will soon be able to click a button on a wearable badge to request help or initiate a rapid response during an emergency.

The buttons are part of the Centegix Safety Platform, which is "an alert and response system designed to reduce response times ... when there is a security issue," Superintendent Brian Mentzer said.

It also works as an alert system for other events like medical emergencies that would require additional personnel or assistance within a building, he added.

The board of education approved the purchase of the safety platform at its meeting Monday evening. The total cost is $205,000, which includes the initial implementation and the annual cost for five years.

The district decided to look into Centegix as it continues to try and improve its procedures, Mentzer said. Recent events and threats against schools nationally and locally were also a factor.

In early September, two students and two teachers were killed at Apalachee High School about an hour from Atlanta, Georgia, when a 14-year-old student opened fire with a semi-automatic rifle at the school.

Schools across the country and St. Louis region, including the metro-east, have been dealing with a surge in violent threats in the wake of the school shooting in Georgia, with law enforcement later deeming many of the threats not credible.

Systems like the Centegix Safety Platform have become more widely-used in recent years, and more than 800 school districts nationwide now use the company's technology, according to a May press release.

Staff at Apalachee High School had been equipped with the Centegix buttons a week before the shooting, and authorities have credited the quick response time for likely saving lives.

Law enforcement responded immediately to the alerts from the buttons and ended the shooting within minutes, Barrow County Sheriff Jud Smith and Georgia Bureau of Investigation Director Chris Hosey told NBC News.

Some states have passed legislation requiring public schools to install "silent panic alarms directly linked to law enforcement" so they can respond as quickly as possible in an emergency, according to Make Our Schools Safe, a nonprofit founded by the family of Alyssa Alhadeff, a 14-year-old girl who died in the 2018 Parkland high school shooting.

The nonprofit lobbies state legislatures to pass "Alyssa's Law," and seven states have done so. Ten others have introduced the legislation.

The law hasn't yet been introduced in the Illinois legislature, but District 201 elected to get the Centegix Security Platform to be proactive, Mentzer said.

Details of how the system will be deployed are still being worked out, but the plan is to widely distribute the badges with buttons to district employees, he said.

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