Responding to an emergency situation can be tough; responding to an emergency situation in a high school with a thousand students can be even tougher.

Frisco Independent School District, the Frisco Police Department, the Frisco Fire Department and the IT Department have a solution. The groups partnered together to launch the Situation Awareness For Emergency Response (SAFER) program to ensure responses to emergencies are handled quickly and efficiently.

The program has a site plan, emergency contact information, camera access and floor plans for each of the 46 campus’ in the district. When an emergency situation such as a fire is called in, the responders can up the floor plans of the school to see the best way to access the fire. The can also pull up the school cameras and see how bad the fire is.  The program can be accessed from the station or from any of the mobile data computers in the police cars or fire trucks.

The response time to a scene is the same but with access to floor plans, site plans, cameras and contacts the situation can be accessed much quicker and a plan is put into place prior to response arriving on the scene.

“What is unique about this system is probably everything,” Fire Chief Mack Borchardt said Coffee with the Mayor on Monday morning.

The program was created by the IT department.  A board member had seen a presentation on a similar program at a conference and brought the idea back to Frisco. The idea didn’t fit every need Frisco had and the department couldn’t find a program that did so the IT department set to work integrating all the information they had into one program.

The fire stations already have floor plans of the schools at the station and a copy of the school floor plan on the truck located closest to that school. There are not floor plans for every school on every truck though. The cameras were also not part of the original plan but were added in as the plan was developed. When IT got done with its programs not only were there plans for every school but every camera in every school can also be accessed through the program.

“In my opinion what our IT department did was phenomenal,” Borchardt said. “We are much better prepared. This (program) was not in response to something but to prepare us for the future.”

The program will allow any fire or police vehicle to respond to any situation at any school and be more prepared when they do so.

The SAFER program was a couple of years in the making and launched at schools in August 2009. Each of the new schools currently under construction will also be added into the program.

The plan for the program next is to expand it into all commercial buildings.