CrisisGo provides emergency communications to schools, cities, law enforcement

Leaders from area schools joined local school administrators and members of law enforcement last week at Drury Plaza Conference Center in Cape Girardeau for a presentation overviewing crisis alert technologies and how to best communicate if a crisis occurs.

The event, organized by The Rite Group president T. Robin Cole, focused on the CrisisGo emergency communication system and featured a presentation by one of the co-founders of the system, Jim Spicuzza of St. Louis.

Spicuzza said the emergency communications system was started after 2012’s Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in Newtown, Connecticut, and has since been implemented at 16,000 schools across the country.

CrisisGo aims to save precious seconds during times of crisis by coordinating alerts, messages and notifications into one secure smartphone application and allow for real-time, synchronous communications among cities, schools and law enforcement.

Attending agencies included law enforcement personnel and public school system representatives from Cape Girardeau, Jackson and Scott City; and private school representatives from Cape Christian, Eagle Ridge, Prodigy Leadership Academy, Saxony Lutheran, St. Paul Lutheran, St. Vincent Catholic and Trinity Lutheran.

Cape Girardeau School District assistant superintendent Josh Crowell explains the functionality of the CrisisGo emergency communications system Thursday at Drury Plaza Conference Center in Cape Girardeau.BEN MATTHEWS

The system has already been implemented in the Cape Girardeau School District, and any school can implement the smartphone system at a cost of $1,200 per year per school building.

The system is provided to law enforcement agencies free of charge, and is also available for municipalities and businesses to purchase.