After an eight-month long wait, Albuquerque Public Schools says it’s ready to roll out a new crisis alert system. 

Centegix CrisisAlert system is a safety alert system that would give APS staff the ability to summon help from anywhere on campus.

Crisis alerts in Albuquerque schools

During a safety drill in 2022, APS discovered a potential problem: teachers struggling to summon help when dealing with a problem in their classroom or elsewhere on campus. Dr. Gabriella Blakey, chief operations officer, and her team began searching for a solution and discovered a company called Centegix and its crisis alert system, which enables teachers to summon help by clicking their badges. That action would send messages to school officials and relay exactly where on campus the emergency is with a mobile alert badge. 

Last spring, the Board of Education signed off on the tool, which comes with a $7.3 million price tag.

Calls for help and active shooters

After one of the largest school shootings in the country at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, TX in 2022, school crisis alert systems came under heavy scrutiny. 

According to reports, poor wi-fi service and a staff desensitized to alerts by frequent notifications diminished the effectiveness of Robb Elementary School’s digital emergency system, in addition to a lack of law enforcement response. 

The result was a massacre of 19 students and two teachers. 

In the aftermath, schools around the country faced a reckoning with how to set up a secure alert system. 

The Centegix alert system touts itself as a better system than the Raptor system which was used in Uvalde. The reason? Centegix doesn’t rely on the school’s WiFi or the cellular network. APS says the system guarantees that the entire campus – be it a ball field or far-off building – would be covered because the company is building its own network.

APS says school staff will get crisis alert badges that must be worn at all times while on campus. If a staffer encounters a medical emergency, students fighting, or another incident and needs help, that staff member would click the badge three times. The badge would vibrate briefly to let the staffer know the signal was received. The call for help would then be relayed to school administrators and public safety. 

In an active shooter situation or similar emergency, the staffer would click the crisis alert badge continuously, and that action would automatically trigger a schoolwide lockdown. Strobes in each classroom and throughout the school would flash, and a prerecorded lockdown announcement would be activated advising everyone at the school to lock their doors and follow the school’s emergency protocols. The system would alert school officials and police of the emergency.

All alerts would be monitored at a centralized APS location.

APS also says the badges don’t track employee movements. They only send out location information when they are activated on an APS campus.

Funding for secure schools 

The New Mexico Public Education Department’s Safe Schools Program requires that all schools create and implement a “Safe Schools Plan.” These plans specify the policies, data collection, and safety measures that schools must maintain. Safe Schools Plans are divided into sections that include Prevention, Protection & Mitigation, Response, and Recovery.

During the 2023 legislative session, state legislators focused on implementing New Mexico school safety solutions in 2023-24. SB 131 appropriates $25 million for public school safety and $75 million for public schools statewide for their local priorities. 

According to APS Superintendent Scott Elder, since 2016, APS has spent $39.8 million on things like cameras and alarms, door locks, fencing and gates, card access, and creating secure vestibules at schools. That number doesn’t include the approved funding for the new crisis alert system.

The system is already up and running at West Mesa High School and Washington Middle School, the two schools that were chosen as pilots, and APS plans to go live with the system at another 29 campuses in late January and February. Elder says the goal is to have the system deployed at all schools by later this spring. 

Currently, Centegix CrisisAlert system is being used at 1500 schools nationwide.