The Attala County School District (ACSD) opted-in to receive nSide, a new health and school safety platform. Free of charge, the platform was made available to 135 Mississippi school districts to create a safer and better learning environment for all students, teachers, and staff. The Mississippi Department of Education (MDE) announced in February its plans to use $14 million of ESSER-III funds to purchase the program and fund the initiative statewide. Costs of the platform and cameras will be covered using ESSER-III monies until Sept. 30, 2024. Implementation and training for ACSD will begin in the coming weeks.
Superintendent Kyle Hammond said the platform will give students added protection while at school. He said a downloadable, mobile app with the ability to alert local emergency responders is one of the most exciting things about the program.
“It's another layer of protection for our students,” he said. “Probably the biggest thing to it is it’s going to provide an app which every staff member (including school resource officers) will be able to download, and if they happen to see anything like an active shooter or fire, they can pull that app up and it’s going to send a message right then to all of your emergency response teams — fire department, ambulance, police station.”
The application also can provide a 360-degree live, virtual walkthrough of each school, which Hammond said will be beneficial. The program can identify the sender’s location and alert officials in order for them to quickly locate and respond to the emergency.
“Immediately, all emergency response folks know. Because within the platform, it has a 3-D mapping of all your schools,” said Hammond. “It actually has a video walkthrough, like the Google Street maps, inside of our schools, so emergency response will be able to pull that up. The detailed mapping is really important for our emergency responders to see that preview of the buildings, so they have an idea where to go when they come there.”
The platform also provides one surveillance camera for the district office and up to five surveillance cameras per school with the ability to detect and notify of crowd congestion.
“We currently have cameras on all of our campuses, but we feel like we are going to be able to integrate those into this platform,” said Hammond. “Also, some areas that don’t currently pickup our camera system, we’ll build that into it.
The School Safety Act of 2019 requires school boards of each district, with assistance from MDE’s Office of Safe and Orderly Schools, to adopt a comprehensive local school district school safety plan and to annually provide a plan update. By offering the nSide platform to districts, a more consistent development and implementation of safety plans is anticipated.
“With nearly every school district in the state choosing to use this innovative health and school safety platform, Mississippi schools will now have a more uniform approach to keeping students, teachers and staff safe,” said Dr. Carey Wright, state superintendent of education. “MDE is confident this platform will be beneficial to districts by helping them prevent and mitigate crises.”
Hammond said schools will upload its emergency operation plans meeting state and federal requirements to the program’s template, which will provide analytics and tips to make safety plans more efficient.
“We will be able to upload those into their template, and then when you practice those drills, everything that we typically do by hand, you're going to be able to go into that software program and kind of track it, giving you some ideas that you can do to improve,” he said. “Training will not only be just on the safety platform, but walkthroughs to help assess and help us identify some other areas. If we say we're going to this remote, separate location for a bomb threat, they could say you may want to do two, separate location areas and do one here and one here.”
Hammond credited the work of school resource officers, external sources, and staff that helped the district lay out its safety plans but said the new program will be yet another resourceful tool.
“This is just one more set of eyes that will help us look at it,” said Hammond.
