‘What’s the cost of a life?’: Winton Woods City Schools installs active shooter response system at high school

FOREST PARK, Ohio — Winton Woods City Schools is investing in a technological way to defend against school shootings.

The district’s 241,000 square-foot North Campus, which houses middle and high schoolers, is now equipped with 45 wall-mounted boxes that serve as first-response devices in the event of an active shooter or other extreme, violent situation.

“We wanted to make sure that we had something in place in the event that there was a disaster,” Superintendent Anthony Smith said. “We want to make sure that this is insurance that you never ever have to use.”

Staff spent much of Monday registering their fingerprints into a database as the SafeDefend Safety Boxes are activated by a biometric scanner on the outside. In the event of an emergency and once a registered fingerprint is scanned on a box, it will open and immediately activate a system-wide alert.

That sounds off to a nationwide monitoring company along with an alert to identified personnel to begin lockdown procedures. Law enforcement is immediately notified of the building and room number where the system was activated.

The boxes also contain items such as gel pepper spray, a baton with a window break, trauma kit, safety vest, flex cuffs, high-intensity strobe flashlight and whistle. There are modules placed around the school, such as in the cafeteria and main hallways, which provide instructions to staff and students as well.

​”It’s probably the most important decision that any administrator will ever make. Hopefully it never happens, but if it does it’s the most important decision,” Craig Deaver said.

SafeDefend is a Kansas-based company founded 10 years ago. Deaver joined the team after a 29-year teaching career.

“I was so tired of being told: throw a history book at the intruder — because I taught history,” he said. “After Uvalde occurred, I asked my wife, I said I want to get into the safety industry, the harm mitigation industry, and I looked all over the place and I couldn’t find a company that had a way to protect the threshold of the classroom and then I found SafeDefend.”

The system does not operate on WIFI or Bluetooth but is instead hardwired into the building just as a fire alarm would be.

Each box costs about the same as a Macbook computer, Smith said. The entire installation cost the district around $60,000, paid for mostly with technology grants and partly by the general fund.

“This process, if it works for us, we want other people to kind of buy into it and then the entire region becomes safer than it was before,” Smith said. “​What’s the cost of a life? The cost of a funeral was much bigger than this to me.”

Smith said he hopes to get more SafeDefend Safety Boxes installed in the district’s South Campus this summer.