Virtual emergency response center a timely addition for this North Texas school district

In this age of COVID-19 forcing many operations to turn to virtual formats, the Keller school district recently announced a partnership with Veoci to build a virtual emergency operations center (EOC).

The cloud-based platform brings plans, communications and dashboards to a single location for emergency events in order to manage an effective response.

“While this is a tool that has immediately proven to be useful for the pandemic, it will continue to serve as our virtual emergency operations center for any future events,” KISD Emergency Management Coordinator Chris McLaughlin said.

“We will be integrating district-level and campus-level emergency operations plans into the system for rapid plan and task activation, real-time communication and coordination, and effective logging for our improvement planning.”

Veoci Senior Account Executive Mark Demski said Keller is one of the first school districts in Texas to go live with the tool.

“We are excited that our technology is able to meet the needs of our clients and provide situational awareness when time is of the essence,” Demski said. “The time this solution saves may make the difference between an unsuccessful and successful outcome.”

Veoci’s cloud-based platform provides for emergency management, team collaboration and daily operations. It is designed to meet the decision-making and communication requirements of multiple teams at many locations.

“We can’t imagine managing this crisis without it,” McLaughlin said. “Veoci has provided immediate help to Keller ISD in our COVID-19 response and recovery, allowing us to safely coordinate critical activities across more than 42 campuses in an effective and efficient manner. We’re able to manage data, resources, and health alerting in real-time, and we know we are just getting started with its capabilities.”

Keller ISD started exploring the Veoci platform just prior to the COVID-19 disaster declaration, but was already moving toward acquiring the product this summer.