What 346,000 Emergency Alerts Reveal About Everyday School Safety

While school shootings and other catastrophic events often dominate public attention, a new CENTEGIX report found that the vast majority of school safety incidents involve everyday situations such as behavioral issues, student welfare concerns, and medical emergencies. The findings are based on an analysis of more than 346,000 wearable panic button alerts from the 2025–2026 school year.

According to the report, 88% of alerts were related to routine incidents, while another 10% involved medical emergencies, underscoring that school staff spend far more time responding to these situations than the rare emergencies that typically make national headlines.

To better understand what these findings mean for school leaders, School Security Leadership spoke with Dr. Roderick Sams, former principal and current Chief Development Officer at CENTEGIX. Drawing on both the report's findings and his experience leading schools, Sams discussed why he believes effective school safety extends far beyond preparing for crisis response.

"Safety incidents happen every day in all different types of school environments," he said. "As a principal, I experienced firsthand how important day-to-day safety measures are for successful school communities. Working in a high school, disruptive behavior was the issue I dealt with most from a safety perspective. We also had our share of medical emergencies and school-wide disruptions."

Sams said the ability to quickly request assistance and respond to those incidents was critical—not only to resolve the immediate situation, but also to minimize disruptions and help teachers and students return to learning.

He emphasized, however, that emergency notification technology is most effective as one component of a layered school safety strategy that also includes training, policies, communication, and a strong culture of safety.

"Being able to respond to those situations quickly and de-escalate them allowed our teachers and students to get back to teaching and learning faster," he said. "As an administrator, it's critical that every staff member, teacher, and student can perform at their best because the environment is safe."

Safety Is the Foundation for School Success

The report found that 94% of school staff said they felt safer with access to a wearable panic button. For Sams, that finding reinforces a broader point: effective school safety isn't simply about responding to emergencies—it's about creating an environment where teachers can teach and students can learn.

"We need to consider how we're supporting teachers in these situations so that quality educators aren't leaving the profession," he said. "Safety plays a significant role in morale. If you can create a safer environment, culture improves, which helps decrease the chance that they will leave the district or even stop teaching altogether."

According to Sams, retaining experienced educators is critical because teacher turnover has ripple effects throughout an entire district.

"When you lose an experienced, high-performing teacher, it impacts the academic achievement of the district and the quality of education that students are receiving," he said. "Likely, you're not going to replace them with a teacher of the same caliber. The damage this turnover has on student achievement and school culture must be considered as well."

Based on his experience leading schools, Sams said those connections fundamentally changed how he viewed school safety—not as a standalone initiative, but as the foundation for overall district success.

"Safety is the centerpiece for school success," he said. "Before we could become an award-winning school, we had to establish a strong safety culture. Once we did that, academic achievement rose to award-winning levels. And our teacher attrition levels fell dramatically because teachers felt better about coming to work."

Using Emergency Alert Data to Strengthen School Safety

One lesson Sams believes deserves more attention is the role data can play in helping districts move from reacting to incidents to preventing them.

"Every time an alert is initiated, it has to be closed by the person who responds to the incident," he said. "Once that alert is closed, it becomes a data point. Districts can then start capturing these individual data points by incident type and location. From there, they can start seeing trends build."

Districts can use that information to identify recurring patterns and make operational changes before problems escalate.

"For example, a district sees that there are more classroom disruptions at one school on Thursdays," he said. "There could be many different reasons why there are so many behavior incidents on Thursdays, so a strategy could be to have more people supervising on Thursdays and seeing if the incident rates drop over a period of time."

Sams said the same approach can be used to evaluate response times, identify opportunities to de-escalate situations more quickly, and measure whether safety initiatives are producing meaningful results. He encouraged school leaders to think about safety metrics the same way they evaluate other district priorities.

"When you invest in a reading platform, you can measure whether it is improving students' reading scores," he said. "How districts measure safety matters just as much. Look for reductions in safety incidents or improvements in response times to medical emergencies and compare them to weeks, months, or years prior."

Sams believes that philosophy should guide how districts approach school safety moving forward.

"If you want to make schools better, make them safer," he said. "We have to think about safety every day, not just during crisis response."