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Education

Schools In Central Florida Roll Out Panic Button App

Lindsey Kilbride

Seminole County is rolling out an app that acts as a panic button for school employees in an emergency.

With a tap of the app, an alert can be sent simultaneously to 911 and school employees. Maps of schools can be loaded into the app that sync with GPS allowing first responders to pinpoint where the call came from.

Seminole County School District Spokesman Michael Lawrence says it’s an extra layer of protection. “A teacher is in a classroom, or even out in a courtyard at high school during lunch or something,” said Lawrence, “and if a kid’s having a cardiac arrest event or something’s going on, they can activate an emergency from their phone.”

The Rave Panic Button is used in school districts across the country, but Seminole County is the first in Florida to install it.

Now that she manages a full newsroom she files less regularly for NPR’s All Things Considered, Morning Edition and Weekend Edition. In 2009 she was part of an NPR series on America’s Battalion out of Camp Lejeune, NC following Marine families during the battalion’s deployment to southern Afghanistan. And because Wilmington was the national test market for the digital television conversion, she became a quasi-expert on DTV, filing stories for NPR on the topic.
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