Empowering emergency response: How Menlo School ensures student safety with Secure911
At Menlo School, Mike, the Director of Technology, understands that in emergency situations, every second counts. Whether it’s a field trip, school dance, or off-campus retreat, having instant access to student health data is essential for the safety and wellbeing of students.
The Secure911 feature within the August Schools platform was built to meet that exact need. Secure911 enables schools to create student summaries that contain critical health information such as allergies and medical conditions, accessible through a QR code or access code. This ensures that vital data is quickly, yet securely, available to chaperones, staff, or emergency personnel.
“From an IT perspective, when you’re building something you want to cover everything. Ultimate flexibility is the best path forward, especially when you’re talking about emergency information,” Mike noted.
Secure911’s design makes sharing critical student information as straightforward as possible, with multiple options for distribution: via email, SMS, fax, QR code, or access code. This range of choices provides the flexibility needed for unique emergency scenarios.
“I appreciated that August built in some of those extra ways to deliver the student summaries.”
The feature’s adaptability and ease of use were helpful during Menlo’s recent 8th grade trip to Washington D.C. When two students needed urgent medical care, chaperones were able to quickly access their health summaries, ensuring quick and informed treatment.
“They had to provide the information from August Schools to give [the medical personnel] consent to treat and know what allergies they had. It went really smoothly,” Mike recounted.
“The solution is really flexible. It offers very granular control over what data you want to show and share and what data you don’t,” Mike noted.
For instance, Menlo wanted to ensure that, if a student had a headache during a retreat, the chaperone could quickly verify the student’s OTC medication permissions to confirm whether administering ibuprofen was allowed.
Mike also values the layered security that Secure911 offers.
“Privacy and security are huge in the work that I do and in our school. We’re working with sensitive data, so I really like that you can set an expiration date on the access,” he said.
This feature allows Menlo to provide temporary access to external parties as needed and then revoke it afterward, ensuring emergency access without compromising data security.
Secure911 strikes the perfect balance—keeping student health data accessible in emergencies while maintaining strict data protection.