By Shelby Stewart-Soldan
Staff Writer
ssoldan@mihomepaper.com
OXFORD TWP. — During the regular meeting on May 26, the Oxford Community Schools Board of Education voted unanimously to approve a proposal for transitioning to the Raptor Emergency and Visitor Management Program.
“We are going to be using Raptor to house all of our threat assessment, suicide risk assessment, and bullying investigations next year as part of the grant that we were awarded,” said Allison Willemin, executive director of school safety.
Raptor Technologies offer visitor management systems, school safety systems, and more for school districts.
“Raptor is a mission partner and 100% aligned with the I Love U Guys Foundation, and that is through the standard response protocol and the standard reunification method that Oxford Community Schools adopted last year,” she said.
The I Love U Guys foundation curates programs for crisis response and post-crisis reunification. The programs are used in more than 50,000 schools and organizations. Raptor Technologies also comply with Alyssa’s Law, which is legislation addressing law enforcement response time and requires silent panic alarms directly linked to law enforcement in schools.
“The state of Michigan will be adopting it for the 2024-2025 school year,” said Willemin. “We were able to move ahead of the curve because I’m a trainer for both of those already.”
Currently, due to sunsetting grants, the visitor management system needed to be replaced, and Willemin anticipates this will be a better system and work in conjunction with other security measures and mass notification system in the district.
“What moving to a Raptor emergency management will do is anything that we need to use for our drills, if we need to reunify, it’s a web-based platform so you can use it on your phone, on a computer, on your iPad, any of that without having to rely on paper-based items, and as part of our reunification kit we do have hot spots,” she said. “If we had to go to some of our reunification locations, the hot spots are there so we’d be able to connect. It does sync with Powerschool, to ensure we have the most up to date information.”
Part of this transition will also be grant funded, but the annual cost to the district will be around $27,000.