St. Louis-Area School Adopts New System to Deal with Active Shooters
Orchard Farm School District unanimously voted to adopt the SafeDefend Active Shooter Response System Tuesday evening. In the wake of several recent school shooting tragedies, Superintendent Dr. Tom Muzzey of the Orchard Farm School Board and the district safety team had vetted numerous approaches to increasing the safety and security of their students and staff. After much review, the decision to adopt the SafeDefend system was an easy one.
The SafeDefend Active Shooter Response System was developed by a former elementary principal. As a father of three and with 475 students under his watch, Jeff Green realized that schools were not addressing the four critical areas needed to protect students and staff.
Those four priorities were:
- reducing law enforcement response time
- ensuring law enforcement and staff had real-time crisis information
- providing the ability for staff to effectively manage the crisis until help arrives
- realizing the biggest threat to our schools is already inside the building
“We continue to see the traditional methods for protecting our students and staff fail us over and over again. Control access does not prevent violence from a student, former student or parent or former employee. These are the most likely perpetrators of violence in schools and all are either supposed to be in the building, will be let in or know how to access the building. We have to address the fact that we cannot lock the problem out. In addition, law enforcement needs critical, accurate information to perform effectively. We have seen a breakdown in communication and complete chaos in these last tragedies. SafeDefend addresses all of these weaknesses in our current approaches,” said Jeff Green, founder and president of SafeDefend.
Dr. Tom Muzzey concurs. “Safety in schools is a multi-layered approach. We need to ensure that the facilities are secure and we can manage our visitors appropriately. In addition, we realize that this does not provide the protection needed inside the building. After vetting several systems and approaches, we selected SafeDefend as our preferred active shooter protection approach. At a cost of around $100 per life, no other company that we found offers the protection, law enforcement compatibility, empowerment of staff and peace of mind to our community like SafeDefend. We look forward to our partnership with SafeDefend.”
Orchard Farm School District is located in St. Charles, Missouri, in the St. Louis area. Orchard FarmSchool District has approximately 2,500 students and staff. The cost for having the system in every classroom and other areas within all of the district buildings was $259,000.
