One employee triggered a lockdown at 11 Cobb County schools this week, Superintendent Chris Ragsdale said at a public meeting Thursday.
Ragsdale emphasized the lockdowns were not caused by a malfunction of the district’s new crisis alert system, Centegix. The system gives employees with badges the ability to trigger a lockdown. A single staff member issued the alert that affected all of the schools, he said.
Ragsdale did not say how one employee was able to affect multiple schools.
Previously, the district only said “multiple schools” were affected by a “human error” on Monday.
The district initiated an “immediate modification” of the system to prevent it from happening again, Ragsdale said. Specific groups of employees will also be retrained. The updates will not diminish the functionality of the system, he said.
“This is not to say that human error can be 100% eliminated,” Ragsdale said. “That will always be a possibility.”
Centegix is the district’s second crisis alert system. Its first one, called AlertPoint, triggered a lockdown at all of the district’s schools when no threat was present in 2021. District officials first called it a “malfunction,” and later, a “targeted, external attack.”
The district spent about $5 million on AlertPoint and about $3 million on the implementation of Centegix this year.
At least one other school experienced a similar situation last week.
Families at Durham Middle School in Acworth were notified on Oct. 6 that a staff member “inadvertently triggered a Code Red,” according to a message obtained by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Ragsdale only mentioned schools that experienced an alert on Monday.
Credit: Photo provided by Centegix
Credit: Photo provided by Centegix
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