Microsoft Customer Solution
US Public Sector Industry Case Study
Palm Beach County Schools and Office of
Public Safety Improve Crisis Response
Overview
Country or Region: United States
Industry: K-12 Education—Emergency
response
Customer Profile
Palm Beach County is the fourth largest
school district in Florida and the tenth
largest in the nation with 176,549
students (PK-12) during the 2005-06
school year.
Business Situation
The Palm Beach County School District
needed a way to notify parents on the
attendance status of all students. It also
wanted to harness this capability to
coordinate emergency response.
Solution
The district implemented a solution that
integrates Dialogic Communications
Corporation's automated multimedia
notification system with Microsoft® .NET
and Microsoft SQL Server™.
Benefits
 Maximize rapid notification
 Minimize time to notification
 Gain million-dollar cost savings
 Optimize staff allocation
 Integrate emergency response
"We were looking for a system that would allow us to
disseminate information via phone, cellular, pager,
and e-mail in an integrated manner."
John Dierdorff, Project Manager, Palm Beach County Schools
Palm Beach County, Florida, is one of the premier holiday and
recreation destinations on the Eastern Seaboard. But the
geographical characteristics that make it a subtropical paradise for
tourists also expose residents and visitors to some of nature's most
fierce weather conditions. In recent years, Florida has regularly
made headlines during the hurricane season, prompting federal,
state, and local first responders and other critical community
officials to hone the region's disaster response and recovery plans.
Officials of Palm Beach County have learned through hard
experience the importance of integrating the school system into
regional response plans. This realization has fostered a growing
relationship between school district administrators and executives
at the county's Public Safety Department, Division of Emergency
Management.
Situation
School facilities often become a critical hub
of activity during local emergency situations.
And because of the unique role schools play
in serving their community, they have access
to local contacts (parents, teachers, and
other members of the community) that are
very useful to emergency responders during
times of crisis. But the need for Palm Beach
County Schools to communicate with their
community of interest is not limited to
predictable emergency situations like
hurricanes.
With approximately 175,000 students spread
out over 163 schools, in a region that hosts
one of the nation's most diverse socioeconomic populations, the county has made
a commitment to keeping parents and
students informed of unpredictable
emergencies that may affect a local
community—such as "hazmat" incidents
stemming from accidents with trucks carrying
toxic cargo, bomb threats that occasionally
get called in as pranks (but which must be
taken seriously), hurricanes and other severe
weather prompting school schedule changes,
or other school/community emergencies that
can end in deep tragedy.
Six years ago the district came face-to-face
with just such an emergency when one of the
students shot and killed a teacher. It was a
post-Columbine tragedy that shocked the
community and demonstrated just how
important it was to get information out to
parents and others in as quick, accurate, and
comprehensive a manner possible.
"There were many rumors going around right
after the shooting in 2000. Parents wanted to
know that their children were safe," says John
Dierdorff, a Project Manager with Palm Beach
County Schools, who has worked with a team
of technologists and educators to implement
a system that can rapidly inform the school
district's community of interest of breaking
developments and provide official
instructions on what to do and when to do it.
"We have learned that it is very important to
get parents involved in a response to crisis
situations like these and others early on, and
provide accurate information in a way that is
readily available to them," adds Helen
Hironimus, another Project Manager involved
in the creation of the new system. "Parents
needed to be told where to go to receive
official information and where not to go to
avoid danger until the situation was under
control."
In the wake of the shooting, and in response
to the major natural threats that would
manifest themselves predictably during the
hurricane season, schools throughout Florida
were mandated to establish systems that
would notify parents if kids were absent from
school at any point during the day for any
reason.
For a county like Palm Beach, that was a tall
order indeed.
"With as many kids as we have, on any given
day our county will have up to 10,000 absent
students whose parents by law must be
notified," says Hironimus.
Even spread out over 163 schools, the
mandate to inform parents—and ensure that
an effective communication has taken
place—put a heavy strain on already scarce
human and technical resources. In an early
effort to bring technology to bear on the
challenge, principals began the process of
deploying devices in schools that would
automatically dial though the school's
telephone systems to deliver recorded
messages. It was a point-solution approach to
the problem, and the implementation process
remained very manually intensive, as well as
expensive.
"Each school in the district was looking at
spending between $8,000 and $12,000 to
deploy this solution. And for those schools
that did not have the funds available, school
secretaries and administration staffs would
have to be pulled off of their core duties to
make the calls mandated by the State
requirement," explains Dierdorf.
Solution
It was at this point that officials in the county
Superintendent's office began to seek a
county-wide solution that would ensure
compliance with the notification requirement
throughout the district, provide some
financial relief to the individual schools, and
still offer each principal the flexibility to
manage the system to address the specific
needs of each school.
The county ended up selecting a solution
from Franklin, Tenn.–based Dialogic
Communications Corporation (DCC). The
company, which has a track record of working
with first responder organizations that
manage resources and coordinate recovery
efforts, has developed a system called
Communicator! NXT that delivers voice and
text messages to virtually all types of devices
(phone, pager, etc.), in an automated and
integrated matter, placing important
information into the hands of parents,
students, and administrators as well as first
responders during a crisis.
The solution has ended up finding a number
of practical applications in the school
environment.
"We were looking to help schools financially.
However, as we have grown the system we
discovered new applications for the
technology," says Dierdorf. "We were looking
for a system that would allow us to
disseminate information via phone, cellular,
pager, and e-mail in an integrated manner.
But it was of utmost importance that we be
able to leverage the voice applications. While
60 percent of households do not have ready
access to a computer or e-mail, nearly
everyone in the county has access to a
phone," he explains.
The system was not only a good fit for the
emergency situations that the county needed
to address, it also has been a boon to countywide management of routine day-to-day
operations. The system integrates Microsoft®
.NET and Microsoft SQL Server™ technologies
to the software so that it cannot only be used
to broadcast information, but is also able to
gather feedback necessary for timely and
appropriate response to specific situations.
The district has dubbed the project “One
Voice” because it is a centralized system at
the superintendent level. It is also a resource
that can be operated locally. The system
operates as a federated database, with
nodes at each of the schools. The information
is aggregated in real time to the county's
mainframe application so that operations can
be coordinated across the county. However,
each school has sign-on access to their
portion of the database and can manage
operations at the school level.
According to Hironimus, approximately 40
schools received training in how to use the
system in December of 2005. Currently 26
pilots of the system are under way to test the
system with 40 more scheduled to have
completed initial implementations.
Because the system operates on a Web
service platform based on .NET technology,
"One Voice" applications can also be shared
with other appropriate county agencies. Work
is currently underway to strengthen joint
operations with emergency response
organizations to coordinate information
sharing and sharpen preparedness and
response activities.
"The database that we have created can be
sorted and manipulated at a very granular
level," says Hironimus. "We are able to zero in
on specific zip codes and push out
information in a very tailored manner. So, for
instance, if there is a hazmat spill that affects
a 12-block area in a specific jurisdiction, we
are now in a position to integrate our
database with the Division of Emergency
Management to rapidly develop voice and
text messages to instruct people who live in
the region on what to do."
Benefits
The implementation to date, say officials, has
been an unbridled success. Beyond delivering
on the basic functionality to address the
notification mandates, there have been
significant improvements in the county's
ability to prepare for and respond to safety
and security issues. From a technical
standpoint, the solution has been able to
garner more returns from existing
investments in technology by optimizing
county investments in telecommunications
infrastructure and by expanding the reach of
information housed and managed on the
central mainframe that houses the school
district’s main database.
"We are now working with DEM [Division of
Emergency Management] to share lines in
times of emergency," says Dierdorf. "The new
system also provides a common
communication interface and allows us to
share communications resources such as T-1
lines, citizen contact information, etc.," he
adds.
The implementation has also introduced
significant cost savings into the equation.
Overall, Palm Beach County Schools have
saved more than one million dollars through
this approach by eliminating the need for
each school to roll out their own solution. And
the district is taking significant advantage of
existing investment in IP telephony.
"The school is currently working with DEM to
integrate Geographic Information Systems
(GIS) to further tailor the county's ability to
alert people of threats and dangers in zip
code areas, significantly enhancing hurricane
emergency notification, amber alert
situations," says Ken White, Warning Point
Supervisor/Dialogic System Administrator at
DEM, who is working with the school system
on this initiative. More than anything else, the
school system and the county are benefiting
from the ability to apply unified messaging
technologies that integrate outbound voice
calls with e-mails.
"It replaces the need to have secretaries work
a telephone bank to notify parents and
guardians of time-sensitive events," says
Dierdorf. In the event of any given emergency,
the principal can broadcast status and
instructions in a multi-media environment in
an integrated manner.
"Also important, the system has very solid
reporting capabilities. It provides an accurate
audit trail of calls that were completed,
messages that were left, busy signals, etc.,"
says Hironimus. Looking forward, the school
is planning to expand its work with DEM to
integrate the school system’s telecom
network with the county’s E911 system.
"This will make it possible for E911 operators
to pinpoint the source of an in-building call to
the desktop on which the phone is set," says
White.
The school district is also upgrading telecom
infrastructure from a 48-line system to a 138line system. This upgrade will allow the One
Voice system to notify all 10,000 parents in
less than one hour compared to the
approximately two hours it takes using the
old system.
For More Information
For more information about Microsoft
products and services, call the Microsoft
Sales Information Center at (800) 4269400. In Canada, call the Microsoft
Canada Information Centre at (877) 5682495. Customers who are deaf or hard-ofhearing can reach Microsoft text telephone
(TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234 in
the United States or (905) 568-9641 in
Canada. Outside the 50 United States and
Canada, please contact your local
Microsoft subsidiary. To access information
using the World Wide Web, go to:
www.microsoft.com
For more information about Dialogic
Communications Corporation products and
services, call 800 723 3207 or visit the
Web site at:
www.dccusa.com
For more information about Palm Beach
County Schools products and services, call
561 434 8228 or visit the Web site at:
www.palmbeachschools.org
Software and Services

This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT
MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS
SUMMARY.
Document published October 2006
Product
− Microsoft SQL Server

Technology
− Microsoft .NET