We looked into these laws in the context of getting an occupancy permit for our new Middle School building in spring 2021.
The gist: yes, they apply to independent schools, for any
new phone system. If you are buying a new phone system, the vendor should already be intimately familiar with the requirements of these laws, as many customers they've had in the past couple of years have needed to meet them. So work with them on meeting the requirements.
We figured out that, because we were using our existing phone system in our new building, it was grandfathered in and we did
not need to meet the requirements of Ray Baum's Act. This was a good thing for us, as it would have been a big headache to add the dispatchable location functionality to the existing system and probably would have required engaging a vendor or consultant ($$$). Our phone system was purchased and installed in 2013 and already met the requirements of Kari's Law -- not sure if that's because it was required at the time, or because we wanted the notification functionality for our own purposes (I know that we did, as it was already part of our emergency response plan, and we also wanted to be able to catch prank calls). We did purchase new (well, refurbished) phones for the new building, and figured out that "new phone system" meant the core hardware/software, not the endpoints, so we were still in the clear.
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David Fulton-Howard
Technical Support Manager
McDonogh School
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Original Message:
Sent: 10-11-2022 01:24 PM
From: Ashley Cross
Subject: Compliance around emergency management
I'm passing along a question from a community member to see if you can lend your insights:
"Is anyone familiar with either Kari's Law or Ray Baum's Act? Apparently, these are two federal laws strengthening the effectiveness of emergency calls at schools.
From what I can tell:
Kari's Law requires multiline telephone communications to allow users to dial 911 without entering a prefix. In addition, Kari's Law requires that notification to another resource (for many districts this would be a security office) is received when a 911 call is made.
Ray Baum's Act requires all multi-line phone systems to send a dispatchable location along with a "call back" number each time a 911 call is made. This helps to ensure that police and other emergency responders understand where to route resources during an urgent situation and how best to respond.
I have just heard of these and don't know a lot about them. Has anyone from this group looked into all the specific requirements for this further or started looking at solutions for your schools? I'm not even sure if Independent schools are impacted or not."
#General
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Dr. Ashley Cross
Senior Director of Education and Content
www.theatlis.org
888-502-8547
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