Georgia teachers pressed new panic buttons during shooting, alerting police

By Andrew Hay

(Reuters) - Teachers at the Georgia high school, where a shooter killed four people on Wednesday, pressed wearable panic buttons -- in use just one week -- to alert law enforcement officers that they were in danger.

Responding officers could potentially pinpoint the location of the person who had pushed the panic button on maps on their mobile phones of the large Apalachee High School campus located around 40 miles northeast of Atlanta. The suspect in the shooting, a 14-year-old student at the high school, faces four counts of murder and will be tried as an adult.

Barrow County Sheriff Jud Smith told a news conference on Wednesday of the panic button system.

"It alerts us to that there is an active situation at the school for whatever reason, and it was pressed," Smith said.

A school resource officer took the shooter into custody within six minutes of the first word of Wednesday's shooting, according to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. It was not clear whether that alert came from a panic button.

With the system, "there is no calling, there is no dispatching, they are moving directly towards that threat," said Mac Hardy of the National Association of School Resource Officers. "We can't say that lives were saved, but I would like to believe they were."

Silent panic alarm systems linked to law enforcement agencies have grown more popular in U.S. schools since the 2018 Parkland, Florida, high school shooting in which 17 people were killed, according to Hardy, who worked as a teacher and then in law enforcement as a school resource officer.

Only a handful of U.S. states require or encourage the systems which cost school districts millions of dollars. Such reactive safety tactics have yet to gain clear scientific evidence to guide their use, according to school safety advocates like Sonali Rajan, a Columbia University professor.

She said the panic buttons are no substitute for a multifaceted, proactive approach that includes analyzing information online to detect threats, gun safety legislation, safe storage of firearms and expanded access to mental healthcare.

    "There is no one single solution," said Rajan, associate professor of health education at Columbia's Teachers College.

    ID-card-like panic buttons, worn on lanyards, rely on private networks installed at schools instead of cell signals and are likely to be on a staff member's person and are simple to use.

    Sheriff Jud Smith said Apalachee High School had a system made by Centegix, one of a number of U.S. companies providing such systems for home and workplace use. Centegix did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

(Reporting By Andrew Hay; editing by Donna Bryson and Diane Craft)