Matthew Duke, the senior director for the Center For Government and Public Affairs at Auburn University at Montgomery, trains Jasper City Schools officials and local emergency responders on the Virtual Alabama School Safety System Thursday. (Photo by: David Lazenby)
Matthew Duke, who conducted the training session at Walker High School, said Jasper is now better equipped to respond to such a worst-case scenario because of the recent training as well as the work his team did over a three-day period to map the school’s key infrastructure and link its security cameras with Virtual Alabama, a 3-D globe interface to retrieve imagery for use in saving lives and safeguarding citizens before, during and after an emergency situation.
Duke, the senior director for the Center For Government and Public Affairs at Auburn University at Montgomery, said, “The purpose of all this is to bring the state’s K-12 public schools into the state’s common operating picture platform for disaster planning, response and recovery. That common operating picture is a tool called Virtual Alabama.”
Duke added, “For this particular project, we’re mapping the key infrastructure inside public schools so first responders have that at the point of need anywhere where they have Internet connectivity so they can more effectively and efficiently respond in times of man-made or natural disasters.”
Now that the high school has been mapped, officials have the tools and knowledge to map other city schools.
Duke’s team is visiting each of the state’s 133 school districts as part of the statewide program driven by the state’s Department of Homeland Security and Department of Education.
“We map one school in that district and then do training so that school officials have the capability to map the rest of the schools and maintain that map over time,” Duke said.
Before the training day was over, local law enforcement officials were already talking about ways they can use Virtual Alabama to protect Jasper children. “That’s really where the rubber meets the road,” Duke said.
Other partners of the Virtual Alabama School Safety System program are the Alabama Criminal Justice Information Center and Alabama Super Computer Authority.
Duke said Virtual Alabama uses Geographic Information Systems built on a Google Earth platform. “That allows us to see photographic imagery of our state and overlay that photographic imagery with icons representing key infrastructure that we need to recognize.”
One of the key aspects of Virtual Alabama School Safety System, according to Duke, is “seeing where the security video cameras are located inside a school and then through the Internet we can provide access to the live videofeed from those cameras.
“Imagine a 9-1-1 calling coming in on a school shooting and that 9-1-1 operator being able to pull up an electronic view of the school in Virtual Alabama and clicking on an icon for the camera system and getting real time feeds to the live security cameras in there and relaying that information to responding officers about the visualization they have of what’s going on inside that school,” Duke said. “It’s about saving time — it’s about saving lives.”