Virginia Western Community College
Leverages SARA to Power Lockdown Notification System
Description
Virginia Western Community College is a two-year public college located on a 70-acre campus in Roanoke, Va. Chartered in 1966, it is the largest single-campus college in the Virginia Community College System with more than 13,000 students.
Opportunity
Virginia Western Community College (VWCC) needed to enhance its mass notification system, comprised of IPsession™ by IPcelerate™ for paging and 911 notifications through the Cisco Systems telephone system in all buildings and classrooms and more than 30 emergency pull stations connected through the building automation system to a loud siren that would signal a “lockdown.”
Three false alarms had sent VWCC and a neighboring elementary school into lockdown situations, creating unnecessary panic and media attention. A stand-alone notification system was needed to initiate the appropriate sequence of actions to notify students, faculty, staff and local media of an actual threat while avoiding false alarms.
Solution
The college’s network and security administrator had noticed that the Situational Awareness and Response Assistance (SARA) software from Status Solutions was integrated into IPsession and believed it had the capabilities VWCC required. After some investigation, the decision was made to remove the existing emergency pull stations from the building automation system as soon as possible, creating an integrated, stand-alone pull station and siren system using the SARA alerting engine. While the existing IPsession server could have been utilized, the college’s preference was to set up a separate SARA server to communicate with the IPsession appliance for easier management.
SARA was implemented in 2010 and now powers VWCC’s lockdown notification system 24/7. If an emergency is called in via phone or an emergency pull station is activated, SARA sets in motion a series of notifications to protect life safety at the campus. These include the lockdown siren and accompanying message with lockdown instructions broadcast through all of the college’s phones as well as PA speakers in the cafeteria and other high-traffic areas.
In addition, SARA alerts campus police and sends a message to a subscription service called VW Alert that will notify students, faculty, staff and local media about an unfolding security situation via email, phone or text. Furthermore, SARA will use VW Alert to notify select VWCC personnel, including campus police and key administrators, as to the exact location of the alarm to aid in the incident investigation.
SARA also is used to monitor the emergency generator for VWCC’s main building, which houses the data center. Weekly and monthly exercises involve running the generator for a set amount of time and then shutting it down. Again, SARA notifies a select group of users, including facility management, as to when the tests have started and ended. Eventually SARA will be used to monitor all nine of VWCC’s emergency generators.
VWCC was very pleased with SARA’s implementation, which was unique because new equipment had to be installed, some tweaks had to be made, and the cutover had to occur when students weren’t on campus. Now in place for more than a year, no false alarms have occurred with SARA and thankfully neither have any major emergencies requiring a lockdown.
“Obviously a lockdown notification system is invaluable if just one life is saved,” explains Doug Parsons, VWCC’s network and security administrator. “Status Solutions helped us create the system that we needed, and SARA does what it’s supposed to do.” The system was configured and is updated via a secure website, and one of the customizations Status Solutions performed enables the VWCC Help Desk to conduct monthly tests of the lockdown
function.
Partnership
VWCC is considering expanding SARA to further automate its lockdown notifications to include automatic website updates and postings to TV monitors that serve as electronic bulletin boards throughout campus. Additionally, SARA is being tied to the college’s fire alarm system, which will further enhance life safety. “We’ve found that SARA will enable us to add capabilities without significant additional costs,” Parsons says.
