The Story

When an emergency strikes, public school personnel must be able to communicate effectively. In many cases, as with the Moore Public Schools, radios alone could not provide adequate coverage to areas like storm shelters and safe rooms, places designed to be physically hard to reach and thus blocking radio signals. Nor are radios a comfortable or affordable type of device for every member of a school’s personnel. However, with the omnipresence of cell phones, Push-to-Talk over Cellular (PoC) applications with connectivity to LTE and/or Wi-Fi have become a viable supplement to an existing radio-only system.

Learn more about how JPS worked with Moore Public Schools to make sure critical personnel were never out of touch.

The Challenge

Utilize the investment in the existing radios and integrate PoC. For the administrators and security personnel in the thirty-five K-12 instructional sites (38 buildings) in the school system, the PoC solution needed to provide seamless integration of their on-site radio system to a PoC cloud-based application.
Additionally, the new PoC solution had to operate on various wireless providers and on Wi-Fi to ensure connectivity in school facility safe rooms used during inclement weather like tornadoes. The system also needed to provide one-to-one, one-to-many, group, and all-call capability.

The Solution

Moore Public Schools consists of four zones and 224 individual users spread over thirty-five schools (38 buildings) as well as administrative and security personnel. To satisfy the requirement to keep the system’s existing radios, each school received an NXU-2A gateway to integrate the on-site radio system. The NXU-2A converts signals from radio to RoIP (Radio over IP). In other words, it digitizes the radio audio so it can be sent over an IP network rather than over the airwaves. This conversion makes the radio audio accessible to non-radio users. In this case, to the numerous LTE users (over 150) on the PoC phone application and to dispatchers. Of course, since communications should go in both directions, it goes without saying that the NXU not only converts radio to RoIP to be transmitted, it also converts RoIP to radio so that radio users can receive audio back from the PoC users. It’s as if everyone is using the same system instead of several different ones.

The Result

The PoC solution incorporating NXU-2A gateways for radio-to-RoIP communications met all the customer’s requirements, integrated well with their infrastructure, and is now the communications standard in daily operation in the Moore Public Schools. In fact, after learning about this success, another Oklahoma school system has also implemented a comparable JPS PoC system.

To be certain that all went well, Chickasaw Personal Communications, Inc., an authorized JPS dealer, ensured the radio system choice and setup proceeded smoothly. They also worked alongside JPS personnel during on-site and remote training for administrators during the installation.

JPS has given our district administrators the ability to have immediate, mass communications. These solutions…provide yet another layer of safety.
-Dustin Horstkoetter, Director of Safety and Security, Moore Public Schools

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