Sometimes it seems new incidents are in the news everyday. Violence, weapons, hazing, gangs, drugs, intrusions and terror have all become commonly associated with our nation's schools. According to The Center for the Prevention of School Violence, school violence is "any behavior that violates a school's educational mission or climate of respect or jeopardizes the intent of the school to be free of aggression against persons or property, drugs, weapons, disruptions, and disorder."

Even though we'd like to believe that most schools in our society are free of many of these problems, reports such as Indicators of School Crime and Safety tell us that "students ages 12-18 were victims of more than 2.5 million total crimes at school in 1999." These findings were reinforced in 2000 by A National Study of School Environment and Problem Behavior: The National Study of Delinquency Prevention in Schools, which found "an estimated 6,451 schools reported at least one violent attack or fight with a weapon to law enforcement personnel during a recent school year."

What to do? Timely, discreet and effective communication systems that alert teachers, administrators and custodians to crisis situations are an answer. But, given today's economic climate it is doubtful that many schools can afford the thousands of dollars it costs to install public address systems that reach classrooms and nearby grounds.

However, even if schools could afford such a system or already have one in place, most public address systems still lack two very important characteristics - discretion and ubiquity. Alerting teachers in addition to students of any age to suspected threats via one loud, booming audible message is not ideal for maintaining calm during potentially intense situations. In addition, such systems are incapable of reaching every possible area of school grounds as well as off-campus facilities.

As a result, many administrators have begun to provide key school personnel, including teachers, security and maintenance staff, with an old, reliable standby that was somewhat forgotten during the recent cellphone craze. For many schools, one-way paging has become a cost-effective, dependable, timely and discreet option for communicating with individuals or selected groups of staff located on or off school grounds.

Timeliness and Discretion
One-way paging has provided many school systems throughout the nation with a near-instantaneous method for reaching administrators, custodians, teachers and emergency personnel during times of crisis. This is possible through the system's ease-of-use and ability to discreetly transmit one-to-one or one-to-many messages through a variety of media.

Typically, most school systems and municipalities utilize a combination of numerical and alphanumerical pagers depending on the needs and position of the user. Numerical pagers generally receive wireless transmissions consisting of phone numbers, codes, date and message time from standard wired and cellular telephone services. However, since the information provided is the more basic of the two technologies, its use is most commonly reserved for less critical purposes by schools and municipalities.

Conversely, in addition to the benefits provided by numerical pagers, alphanumeric pagers offer users the ability to alert users via detail text descriptions or voice messages left on a voice mailbox system. The text messages, which can consist of statistics, detailed situational analyses or timely emergency instructions, can be sent to one person or a group of individuals simultaneously from a computer, Internet Web page, phone system or e-mail. Users need only click the person's name or a group file on the computer, type the message and then hit send to distribute efficient, timely and extremely discreet messages to one or more recipients within seconds and without alarming others, including children, to potential crises.

In addition, pagers can provide even greater discretion by alerting users to messages via vibrations rather than audible sounds. Another advantage is the pager's ability to discreetly alert users to voice messages left on the system's voice mail system.