New York will become the first city in the nation to directly link public schools to the 911 system, part of a new pilot program officials say will speed up emergency response times in the event of an active shooter or other weapon-related threat.<\/p>\n
Mayor Eric Adams announced the initiative Monday at Spring Creek Community School in Brooklyn, the first school campus to install the system.<\/p>\n
What You Need To Know<\/p>\n
New York City will pilot a first-in-the-nation system linking public schools directly to 911 to speed emergency responses to active shooter or weapon threats<\/p>\n
The new Emergency Alert System, developed by the city\u2019s Office of Technology and Innovation, lets schools trigger a 911 alert through buttons or wireless lanyards, reaching dispatchers in under 10 seconds<\/p>\n
The pilot will roll out to 25 school buildings across all five boroughs during the 2025-26 school year amid growing national concern over school shootings<\/p>\n
The Emergency Alert System \u2014 developed by the city\u2019s Office of Technology and Innovation \u2014 allows schools to instantly contact 911 through fixed buttons and wireless lanyards.<\/p>\n
Alerts sent through the system bypass the usual 911 call flow, getting routed straight to real-time dispatch and initiating a response in under 10 seconds, Adams said.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn an ideal world, it\u2019s hard to believe that we would have to even talk about having an emergency notification system because of an active shooter, but we cannot live in a level of idealism,\u201d he said. \u201cWe have to make public safety\u00a0realism, and this is the reality that we\u2019re in, and we\u2019re going to address it.\u201d<\/p>\n
The program will expand to 25 school buildings encompassing 51 public schools across all five boroughs during the 2025\u201326 school year, City Hall said.<\/p>\n
City officials said the system was developed internally, as no existing commercial product could directly connect schools to New York City\u2019s 911 infrastructure.<\/p>\n
The new platform includes dashboards providing real-time data for law enforcement and school administrators during an emergency, according to City Hall.<\/p>\n
The pilot comes amid continuing concerns over school shootings nationwide. According to the K-12 School Shooting Database, there have been more than 1,900 incidents since 2015, with 351 in 2023 alone and 336 in 2024.<\/p>\n
“What we\u2019re talking about today with this emergency alert system is that in the event that something happens in a school, minutes matter, seconds matter,\u201d New York City Chief Technology Officer Matthew Fraser said. \u201cAnd [so does] making sure that those that are in the school are aware of what\u2019s happening and getting them to the safest place possible.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"New York will become the first city in the nation to directly link public schools to the 911…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":18593,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[203,387,25,128,67,9,24,12,63,1435,308,129,131,130,27],"class_list":{"0":"post-18592","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-the-bronx","8":"tag-app-education","9":"tag-app-public-safety","10":"tag-app-top-stories","11":"tag-bronx","12":"tag-education","13":"tag-new-york","14":"tag-new-york-city","15":"tag-news","16":"tag-nyc","17":"tag-patrick-adcroft","18":"tag-public-safety","19":"tag-the-bronx","20":"tag-the-bronx-headlines","21":"tag-the-bronx-news","22":"tag-top-stories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18592","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18592"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18592\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/18593"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18592"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18592"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18592"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}