Oconto Falls School District alert systems to get an upgrade

Camera Corner/Connecting Point of Green Bay has been tabbed to bring the Oconto Falls School District’s phone, clock, public address, bell and emergency notification systems into the 21st century.

The Oconto Falls School Board on April 11 approved the recommendation of Cory Jeffers, its technology director, who led an audit of those systems this winter.

“Oftentimes those are integrated with each other, coming from the same server, they all talk to each other in a lot of cases,” Jeffers told the board. “In a good situation that’s normally how it would go, and generally where you want to work toward.”

The answer to the basic question “What time is it?” differs from room to room throughout the district, he said.

“If you were to go to the store and buy a bunch of manual clocks and put them on the wall, that’s basically what we have right now,” Jeffers said.

Portions of the schools’ PA systems are failing and obsolete, and finding replacement parts can involve searching for them on eBay. The bell systems are also in need of replacement, he said.

The district replaced its phones in 2016 but chose a system that is hard to integrate with the various alert devices.

“The phone system at that time, I understand, this is prior to my time, was in really rough shape, and it was kind of an emergency,” Jeffers said, “It was, ‘Just get a phone system to be able to call each other,’ because even that was starting to not function at that time.”

Recent security upgrades have installed “panic buttons” to lock all doors in buildings simultaneously, and they have capability to tie into an emergency notification system that would alert all buildings at once, but that system is not in place yet, he said.

Camera Corner/Connecting Point was chosen among three vendors that responded to a request for proposals. Its initial cost of $420,803 is actually more expensive at the outset, but over time annual software license fees and other costs were higher with the other vendors, and the district will save an estimated $40,000 over 10 years, Jeffers said.

Board member Bryan Baumler said the cost was higher than he anticipated.

“I’m having a little sticker shock, but I do understand that communication is key to our students’ safety,” Baumler said. “If you don’t have a PA system that’s going to warn somebody of the danger or an issue, that’s not fair to our students.”