School shootings prompt more states to fund digital maps for first responders

When a motion detector went off at Kromrey Middle School overnight, a police dispatcher called up a digital map of the building, located the detector, clicked on a live feed from the nearest camera and relayed the intruder’s location to the responding Police.

Within moments they were able to arrest the perpetrator: a teenager, dressed in dark clothing and a balaclava, but without a weapon.

The map and cameras “help the dispatcher make sure things don’t super-escalate,” said the school’s director of safety, Jim Blodgett. “The dispatcher noticed that it looked like a student … just wandering around the building.”

Spurred by mass shootings, thousands of school districts have hired companies to produce detailed digital maps that will help police, firefighters and medical professionals respond more quickly to emergencies.

The Middleton-Cross Plains Area School District, where the teenage intruder entered through a roof hatch, was an early adopter in Wisconsin, which has since provided mapping grants to about 200 districts.

More than two dozen states have introduced or proposed digital school mapping measures in recent years, according to an Associated Press analysis aided by billing software Plural. Florida approved $14 million in grants last year. Michigan has allocated $12.5 million. New Jersey has allocated $12.3 million in federal pandemic relief funds to complete digital mapping of every school in the state.

The Critical Response Group, led by an Army Special Operations veteran, has driven this trend. The New Jersey-based company’s CEO, Mike Rodgers, recently told lawmakers in Maryland how he used digital grid maps during deployments and was surprised that the school where his wife taught didn’t have anything similar. So he mapped her school and then expanded it to 12,000 schools across the country.

“If there’s an emergency at a school or a place of worship, it’s most likely the first time those first responders have gone there,” Rodgers told the AP. “They are under an enormous amount of stress and working with people they don’t know, which is exactly the same problem that the military faces overseas, and ultimately that’s why this technique was born.”

Many of the state laws and bills contain nearly identical language championed by Rodgers’ company. They require verification by a tour of each campus and free compatibility with all software already used by local schools and public safety agencies. They must be overlaid with aerial imagery and grid coordinates, “oriented to true north” and “contain location-specific labels” for rooms, doors, hallways, stairwells, utilities, hazard areas, key boxes, trauma kits and automated external defibrillators.

The standards create “a competitive, fair environment” for all suppliers, Rodgers said. But when New Jersey sought a mapping contractor, the Critical Response Group had “the only product available in the state that met the legal criteria,” said mapping coordinator Lt. Brendan Liston of the state police.

New Jersey law required “critical incident mapping data,” a phrase that Critical Response Group tried to trademark.

The Critical Response Group has hired lobbyists in more than 20 states to advocate for specific standards, according to an AP review of state lobbying data. Competitors have also brought in lobbyists to argue over the precise wording. In some states, lawmakers have opted for a more generic label of “school card data.”

Four companies that offer digital maps as part of their services — Critical Response Group, Centegix, GeoComm and Navigate360 — have collectively spent more than $1.4 million on lobbyists in 15 states, according to an AP analysis. Its costs are unknown in some states where lobbyist payments are not publicly reported.

Delaware and Virginia also opted for the Critical Response Group program. Iowa has signed a contract with GeoComm. Other states leave vendor decisions to local schools.

A U.S. Department of Justice investigation into the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, found that police had only “a basic map” that did not show any windows or doors connecting classrooms as they waited to to confront the shooter.

The Texas Education Agency responded last year with new standards requiring “accurate location layout” and door designations to be provided to 911 agencies. The Legislature has reinforced this by requiring silent panic buttons and armed security guards as part of a more than $1 billion school safety initiative.

Each card can cost several thousand dollars to create, and costs can escalate if cards are linked to other security systems, such as portable panic buttons. But integrations also add value.

“If it’s not integrated with a crisis response system that can be sent electronically to dispatch and law enforcement, it’s probably not going to mean anything to them in the first few minutes,” said Jeremy Gulley, the Jay County school system’s superintendent. Indiana, which uses a Centegix mapping and alert system.

Because of their detailed information, digital school maps are exempt from public disclosure in some states by law. That’s critical to school safety, said Chuck Wilson, president of the Partner Alliance for Safer Schools, a nonprofit coalition of education groups, law enforcement and safety companies.

“If bad people had access to the drawings, that would almost be worse than not knowing” the layout of a school, Wilson said. He added: “We have to be very, very careful about protecting this information.”

Many schools have long provided maps to local first responders. But they haven’t always been digital. Like Uvalde, some plans are missing important details or are outdated as schools are renovated and expanded.

Washington began digitally mapping every school in the state 20 years ago, after the deadly shooting at Columbine High School in Colorado, and provided annual funding to the Washington Association of Sheriffs & Police chiefs will manage the card storage.

But over time, schools stopped updating the information and the maps became outdated. State funding proved insufficient and lawmakers ended the program in 2021, just as more states launched similar initiatives.

Security consultant David Corr led the program and wished it could have continued, but he said that for first responders, “misinformation is even worse than a lack of information.”