Giving Compass' Take:

• Anaheim High School will be the first to have every inch of it's hallways and classrooms digitally mapped and sent to first responders so they have access to the blueprints on various devices.

•  How can other schools provide first responders with similar information if they do not have the technology to create a digital map?

• Digitally mapping schools is a good way to implement safety measures as a response to school shootings. It seems to be a better alternative to arming teachers with guns, which research shows is an ineffective strategy. 

Among the many disturbing truths that came to light following the 1999 massacre at Columbine High School was that it took Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold only 16 minutes to kill 13 people and wound 21 others. But it took police three hours and 14 minutes to find all of them. More than 19 years later, police nationwide are still lacking crucial information about a school’s layout and what’s inside it when they respond to a shooting or other dangerous situation, experts say.

This, however, is no longer the case for Anaheim High School, the first school in the nation to have its every nook and cranny digitally mapped and the files made accessible to first responders on their computers, tablets or phones.

The system is the brainchild of David Sobel, a former Escondido cop who 18 years ago opened his own San Diego-based security consulting firm, The Sobel Group. Sobel said he came up with the concept a decade ago, but had to wait for the technology to catch up before his idea could be turned into something usable for first responders and affordable to schools and other institutions.

At Anaheim High, Sobel and his crew took more than 15,000 360-degree, high-resolution images — documenting every inch of the school where a human being can go, from hallways, offices and classrooms to closets, lofts and crawl spaces, Sobel said.

The images were then loaded into a system that also includes up-to-date floor plans of the school, making it possible for those on the scene and in the command center to see a split-screen, with the image of a room or hallway on one side and the floor plan on the other. This allows first responders to simultaneously do a virtual walk-through of the building and track where they are on the floor plan.

Read the full article about digitally mapping high schools by David Washburn at EdSource