Madison’s Edgewood High School adopts wearable alerts to speed emergency response
Edgewood High School in Madison is revamping its approach to school safety this fall with two new tools — a phone app and a wearable alert — that allow any school staff to call for help.
Edgewood High School now uses InformaCast, a cellphone app from Madison-based Singlewire Software. The app allows any teacher or school administrator to alert others in the building for a range of situations, including medical incidents, safety threats, weather and student conflicts.
For example, if paramedics are needed for a medical incident, “I could, using InformaCast, activate the need for that medical team, and then the next thing I could do is change us (the building’s status) and put us into a hold,” said Tim Patton, Edgewood’s director of facilities and safety. “That hold would put everybody out of the hallways, and it would facilitate that movement of first responders into the building.”
