SEMINOLE COUNTY, Fla. – Feb. 14 will mark six years since 17 people were gunned down at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, but new mapping technology aims to keep kids safe in school.
Door-by-door, hall-by-hall, Seminole County deputies regularly check to make sure school doors are locked and rooms are properly labeled. It’s all to make sure Seminole schools are secure.
“Having maps, as silly as it may sound, helps us recover faster,” said Chief Rick Francis, who oversees school safety and security for Seminole County.
Francis says the need for a uniform, detailed mapping system came to light years ago during a training exercise.
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“The first person to go through the scenario was the officer deputy that was responsible at school, of course, they’re calling out things like ‘Cubby Bear Hallway’ and we don’t know what Cubby Bear Hallway is,” said Francis. “We started running subsequent people through and they’re like, ‘I’m in a yellow hallway’ and we’re like, ‘well, our maps don’t say anything about Cubby Bear, or yellow, or whatever. So we realized real quick that the archaic maps we were using were not enough.”
Seminole County was one of the first in the state to ditch decades-old blueprints and birds-eye view maps and instead, adopt a new layer of security: a high-tech, detailed map of every school campus. Each map is equipped with a grid.
“So we put letters across the top, numbers across the side and we gridded out that entire village,” said Alex Carney, a co-founder of Critical Response Group, the company that developed Seminole’s maps.
Carney was a Special Ops Officer in the Marines. For him, it’s a concept that was born on the battlefield.
“For us, it wasn’t how do you communicate in a really big building like a high school? It was, how do you communicate about that mud hut?” said Carney.
“The secret of this was that everyone who was going to an operation in Iraq, Iraq village 192, got the same map,” said Carney.
The same map with all the buildings, rooms, hallways — even the location of cameras, first-aid supplies and electrical panels — accurately identified and labeled. The digital maps must also be compatible with any software used by local law enforcement so no matter who responds, they’re all on the same page.
Carney says it’s the same type of map used to capture Osama bin Laden.
“What you see in front of Secretary Clinton is the GRG (map) of bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan,” said Carney.
Francis says they’ve already used the maps in various incidents and training exercises.
“As an incident commander, or the person responsible for school safety, I can direct teams accordingly into the school. I’m looking at, of course, my video overlay with my maps and if we’re if we’re trying to find or eliminate a threat, then we can guide resources accordingly,” said Francis.
The chief says the maps are so critical they‘ve even caught the eye of state lawmakers. Last year, the chief helped draft House Bill 301, which now provides $14 million in grants for districts statewide to develop similar maps.
Each year, Seminole also updates its maps. Deputies walk through all schools to make sure any changes are reflected accordingly so as buildings are modified, law enforcement won’t be caught off guard in case of an emergency. Critical Response Group says the cost to create a map is approximately $3,500 per school.
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