doing it right every time

Missing Student (Assistance Needed) - Elementary

Picture this, the bus normally drops the kids off in your neighborhood around 3:15.  The bus has already come by to drop off the other kids but your son hasn’t shown up yet. The mother is used to waiting an extra 10 minutes for him to finish talking with his friends and walk back to the house. He usually is home by 3:30 at the latest. She slowly watches 3:30 come and go. She starts calling the homes of the other kids from the bus to see if he stopped by their houses to play, but after calling his best friend’s house she discovered that her son never even got on the bus. This is a real situation that a parent was facing not so long ago. 

The mother quickly contacted the school to find out if he had missed the bus or stayed late at the school. As soon as the mother contacted the teacher, the teacher was able to activate the DIR-S alert. Within seconds other teachers were alerted as well as the resource officer and dispatch. Minutes later the student was located and accounted for. Without DIR-S, a response that only took a matter of just a few minutes, could have become a couple of hours; hours which could have allowed the unthinkable to happen. 
This mother’s panic was alleviated within minutes and the story has the best kind of ending thanks to DIR-S’s quick response system. 
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Many people feel that a system like DIR-S is only used in certain cases- in dire circumstances after you have exhausted all other resources available to you. It is crucial  to remember that DIR-S is not a last line of defense, it is the first line of defense because it cuts out all of the time wasting elements of typing out emails or texts or dialing individual people on the phone. All of that happens simultaneously so that everyone who needs to be notified receives the alert within seconds. 

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Fight (Assistance Needed) - High School
 
Now picture this, you are at the end of a long day of being the head administrator of a large high school. Bullying is a major issue that you are always on the look-out for, trying to put an end to it wherever it arrises. You are walking through the halls and suddenly see a group of boys arguing and it immediately escalates to them throwing fists at each other. You can instantly see that you need to break up the fight as quickly as you can while simultaneously notifying the faculty to reroute other students away from this hallway, clear students who are not involved in the fight from the hallway, notify the school resource officer and de-escalate the situation as quickly as humanly possible. Luckily, you have DIR-S on your phone. With 2 quick swipes you have done all but break up the fight. The student resource officer quickly arrives and is able to break it up and keep everyone posted on the status of the situation in real time. 
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Educators and school administrators have so much to focus on that adding “break up fights” to their list of to do’s is literally the breaking point for many of them. Having an easy and effective way for them to contact the school resource officer and help protect other students from being harmed is empowering. It adds a level of stability and security that heretofore is unprecedented in how readily accessible it is. Once again DIR-S is the first line of defense quickly addressing the issue and helping those first responders to get where they need to be, all the while allowing others to stay out of harm’s way.  

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