Humboldt County School District Selects
Visual Imagry for District Emergency Preparedness Project

Nevada - Charlie Smith, Director of Facility Operations, announced that Visual Imagry, Inc. has been selected as the contractor for the Humboldt County School District's upcoming emergency preparedness project designed to enhance and improve a safe learning environment for students by providing emergency planning.

Visual Imagry was awarded the contract and it was accepted during the HCSD School Board meeting. The contract will be funded from a $132,507 School Readiness & Emergency Management grant awarded to the HCSD by the U.S. Department of Education on August 23, 2005.

Visual Imagry will be required to inventory all HCSD schools and take digital photographs, 360 digital movies and collect other critical school site specific data and integrate them into an interactive electronic database.

"Once the project has been completed, our goal is to provide emergency first responders, such as our local area volunteer fire department and police departments, with a virtual tour of our schools and administrative buildings," said Smith. "When responding to an emergency, they could easily access the data from their laptop computers and quickly know exactly where everything in building was located. Think of it, with just a few clicks of a mouse they could view anywhere in the school facility, as well as having access to aerials and floor and site plans."

Visual Imagry, Inc. will also develop a secure web site for the District designed to become an interactive tool for build an extensive network for disaster planning, preparing, training, communicating or responding to any school threat or emergency. This secure web site will operate separately and independently of any HCSD web site and does not require District IT support.

"We hope that the secure web site, developed through VIPlanning® Online Services, will be used to removed the barriers of time and distance between administrators, principals, emergency management staff, first responders and other HCSD authorized users," said Dolores Beaugez, Chief Operating Officer of Visual Imagry, Inc. "We have learned from users of our online systems, that our secure site can be used to strengthen communications and information technology systems critical to effectively prepare or respond to any type of emergency or disaster that could impact the Humboldt County School District or the community."

This secure application is key for sharing sensitive data and collaboration between school officials, school police, emergency preparedness staff and authorized first responders. Information can be shared among authorized secure users and, when appropriate, with the authorized first responders.

Each school will have its own controlled-access secure School Site Forum and they can also participate in the All-Schools Forum and the District Forum. These Forums allow authorized users to initiate and participate in discussions, start new topic areas and publish working documents and links for peer review and comment.

"Children are our future and their safety is our responsibility, " said Ms. Beaugez."It has been proven that technology can help schools better prepare and respond to any type of school incident. VIPlanning® Software is being used to change the way school districts approach to disaster preparedness and readiness. Authorized users are able to access their school's HTML preplans and data to help them mitigate disaster incidents for all hazards during all seasons."

Visual Imagry will also be providing preparedness trainings so that the district principals and administrators can begin learning the Incident Command System (ICS) for schools. The grant also requires that all information be compatible with the National Incident Management System.

The contract and all phases of the work will need to be completed over the next 18 months. At the conclusion of all work, an outside third part evaluator will audit the project to ensure that all terms of the grant award have been fulfilled.

Beaugez, president of Visual Imagry, Inc. was selected to co-coordinate the project. Visual Imagry's evaluation team will be reviewing the HCSD emergency management plan and providing ICS/NIMS training for the principals and District emergency preparedness staff. The HTML preplans will be developed using VIPlanning® Software.

Visual Imagry, Inc. was also selected as the contractor for the Washoe County School District's upcoming preparedness project designed to improve their schools security and the district's ability to respond to emergencies. The funding for the WCSD project was also awarded by the U.S. Department of Education Education's as part of the School Readiness & Emergency Management grant funding for 2005.