What do you do when your wife, an elementary teacher comes home frustrated day after day due to communication issues that affect her and more importantly her students? Some issues that may seem small to some to the average person are very important to teachers of our children. What is a teacher to do when there is an issue/emergency that needs to be handled immediately? Typically a phone call is placed in hopes that someone answers it and then they need to try to find someone to help with the issue. Many times the answers come too late.
As a good husband, you try to find a way to fix the issues.
That is precisely what our crew at Badge Messenger set out to achieve. We wanted to find a way to use existing technology in common sense applications to make communication simple and convenient for teachers and administration. Badge Messenger® is an instant communication system, it improves classroom safety and saves time for teachers and administrators. Across America, our teachers provide direction, leadership, safety, and comfort in the classroom so let’s give them the tools they need to achieve success.
Let me introduce you to Badge Messenger. We developed a two-way communicator that is small, comfortable, instant, rechargeable and it doesn’t require existing wireless, cellular, or network systems. At a touch of a button, it can connect classrooms to a central location like your school's office and also the people that need to reply to an issue. It can be customized to handle all areas within a schools protocol such as; emergency lockdown for things like fires, tornados evacuations, for maintenance issues such as supplies, spill cleanup or electrical, for medical issues, a sickness, injury or an allergic reaction, for security of unapproved guests, missing students, of fights and other unique situations, needing a para-professional, teacher replacement, etc.
Our Badge Holder Messaging System is a patent pending bi-directional wireless message communication system consisting of a portable base station (CAREL) and individual user devices that are elegantly integrated into wearable communicating identification badge holder. This message system is designed to integrate and enhance an organization’s existing emergency system protocol. The base station can be used as a desktop or as a mobile command center.
The badge holders are externally wearable devices that are easily accessible, unlike smartphones which are normally stored in a pocket, purse, or desk drawer and require menu and submenu navigation in an emergency. The base station and the badge holders are fully functional in a power outage. The system utilizes a 900 MHz communication protocol for long range and great obstruction penetration and is not susceptible to cellular or Wi-Fi congestion which is common during an emergency alert.
When the team came up with this idea it hit home with me for both for educational and security reasons. I am a former school board member/chair in District 742 in St. Cloud, MN and had five sons go through this great school system. I come from an extensive military family as I am a Marine and have five sons who have all served with three of them making it a career so security is very important. Most importantly, I have seven grandchildren and the security/safety of our schools is very important to me. I am leveraging my experience to guide our product development team to deliver products that will provide a safer environment for our students and the faculty dedicated to their education and future success.
Our team has extensive experience in electronics design and manufacturing experience with a track record decades long in the field of safety and security. Our first pilot school is up and running at this time St. Francis Xavier in Sartell, Minnesota. We also plan to have thousands of badge holders in operation in pilot schools soon. These schools will provide invaluable feedback, hardware tweaks, and software enhancements.