The Solution Though SMS was initially integrated with the facial recognition solution at the Greenfield Campus, Haber said that the school recently decided to do away with the biometric aspect of the system after realizing that Vanderbilt was meeting all of their access needs. The SMS platform has subsequently been deployed at the Agritopia and high school campuses as well, enabling the district to streamline its security operations, such as being able to initiate a district-wide lockdown in an instant. Haber said that both “soft” and “hard” buttons have been installed throughout all three schools which give staff the ability to put the district into lockdown and alert administrators of potential security threats. On the Greenfield Campus, 365 Technologies also integrated a panic alarm with SMS that provides every teacher with a serial numbered button that can give school officials immediate information about who initiated the alert and where an event is taking place in the facility. “The other schools have a wireless button and, if you hit it, the school goes into lockdown, but you really don’t know where that lockdown came from,” Haber explained. “At the new school, if teacher John Doe in room 120, for argument’s sake, hits this button, then it will tell us that person so we know where the threat is.” Klontz, who is responsible for managing the system on a day-to-day basis, also said that SMS has given them the ability to set up varying access privileges for different individuals based on time-based restrictions and other variables, which is something they couldn’t do previously. “On the high school campus we’ve given out staff ID badges for pretty much anyone who needs access – everyone from hired staff to coaches who come in on a volunteer basis and we have different time zones (of access) for all of those different types of people,” Klontz said.