Ensuring the safety of students, staff, and visitors to campuses has surged to the forefront of a national conversation in the wake of now three tragic school shooting events since the beginning of the 2025 academic year.
On Aug. 27, two children were killed and multiple people were injured in a shooting during a church service for students from Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis. On Sept. 10, a student shot and injured two teenagers, then took his own life, at Evergreen High School near Denver. And later that same day, a gunman shot and killed political activist Charlie Kirk during a campus event at Utah Valley University, where an estimated 3,000 students and visitors were in attendance.
The very next day after the Minneapolis school shooting, the South Carolina Department of Education announced that every public K-12 school in the state would be digitally mapped by a company called Critical Response Group (CRG) to help give first responders essential information needed to quickly and efficiently navigate campus buildings during emergency events.
According to Patrick Kelly, Director of Governmental Affairs for the Palmetto State Teachers Association, the concept of mapping South Carolina’s public schools first arose in the General Assembly two sessions ago. “It was a natural extension of conversations that had already been ongoing over the course of years around school safety. For three consecutive years, the General Assemblies put $20 million in the budget for facilities upgrades. Three years ago, our state became one of the first in the nation with a targeted center for training for law enforcement around school violence. It's a SLED-managed facility in Lexington County. So, this mapping program is a natural extension of those other efforts to enhance the safety of students on campus.”
Mike Rodgers is the creator and CEO of Critical Response Group. He was born into a family of law enforcement, with his father being a fifth-generation police officer. Rodgers served in the U.S. Army as a Captain during multiple combat deployments with Special Operations, where he was introduced to the mapping technique while serving overseas. He is also a parent, and his wife is a third-grade school teacher.
“When I came home, I wanted to take what I learned overseas. I initially applied it to my wife's school because, my family being in law enforcement, I had a unique opportunity to kind of look behind the curtain and examine the techniques and tactics and, most importantly, technology that was supporting first responders when they respond to an emergency at a school, and saw the need for accurate indoor mapping that was compatible with the systems in use and set down a path to solve that problem.”
When CRG launched ten years ago, the first thing Rodgers noticed when reviewing maps provided by schools was that every single one of those maps was wrong. “That's because the average school building in the country is very old, a little around 50 years old on average. So that's 50 years of changes, renovations, and additions.” That was the moment Rodgers and his staff determined they needed to physically walk every single school they were working with to ensure the accuracy of their maps and that the labeling of those maps matched the labeling convention of each school. “So if the front door of the first school is “1,” and the next one is “A,” and the next one is “Q,” the labels will match the individual schools, so that when a responder shows up, the map that they're looking at will represent the structure that they're responding to.” And as schools continue to renovate, expand, and new schools are built, CRG and local school districts will stay in communication about such changes to keep maps updated.
Having accurate school mapping buys back precious time for first responders when seconds count during such events as medical emergencies, natural disasters, HAZMAT spills, and criminal activity. Rodgers says CRG strongly believes that the mapping helps save lives. “One, it reduces response times, but more importantly, it lets first responders work more effectively and efficiently together. It allows a first responder of different disciplines--a police officer, a firefighter, a sheriff's deputy, a 911 dispatcher--to speak a common language. And when they speak a common language, they can work together in a more efficient manner to save lives.”
And, rather than implementing a new technology within a community’s public safety system, Rodgers says that CRG uses the existing ecosystem of public safety software that providers have already established. “If we try to force everyone onto a new app or a new third-party system, the officers aren't trained on it, they're not going to be able to use it during a critical incident. So, we want to leverage and use the technology that they use for daily operations.”
Rodgers explains how a call unfolds in real time after a 911 call is made: “Whatever software is used in that 911 call handling center, our maps populate in real time in front of that 911 public safety telecommunicator. When the police officer or firefighters are driving there in their vehicles, on the MDTs of the vehicle--the computer screens in the car--our maps live there. If the schools have a panic button or security that they are using to increase their security posture, our maps will live in that panic button. So, no matter what type of tech is deployed in the space, we are creating a common operating picture through the data. Our data is just agnostic to whatever anybody has bought, no matter what software system they want to use. It's our map that they're looking at as the base layer.”
As a teacher for Richland School District 2, Patrick Kelly explains how that panic button is used in his school, “It's a badge that goes behind my ID. It's a little card with a button on it. If I click the button three times, then that notifies the front office that I have an emergent need in my classroom. For example, if a student has a medical emergency, that will bring administration to my classroom, and I can focus on the student without having to go pick up the phone or something. If I just start clicking away on that button seven times or more, it initiates a school-wide lockdown. And, so, the emergency lights go off. The teachers that have the clear touch, big TV panels that are up, connected to the Internet, those are automatically overridden with a visual message that says that you're entering a lockdown procedure. And, so, we get instantaneous alerts. On campus, if somebody clicks that button seven times, that is a phenomenal resource. It has been proven to be effective.” Kelly points to the example of the school shooting that took place at Apalachee High School in Georgia on September 4, 2024. “Law enforcement credited that kind of alert system with saving multiple lives because of how quickly the school could proceed to lockdown.” The panic button system at Apalachee High School had been active for only about a week before the shooting incident occurred.
CRG’s mapping is on track to be completed within a six-month period, covering South Carolina’s approximately 1,167 public schools. Rodgers estimates that by the end of this year, most, if not all, of the work will be complete. “It'll be a full company effort. We're about 180 people strong today: everything from our training implementation team, which are all former law enforcement—former fire, former 911—they'll be working in tandem with our mapping team that is going on site to go and gather the information. The cartography team that's actually building all the data, pulling the imagery, pulling the labels. And then that implementation team will be working with the first responders to understand what systems that they have deployed at this time. And then, ultimately, what is the best way for us to put our maps into those different systems. So, it'll be an entire company effort, marching in one direction.”
There are, however, two caveats for South Carolina public schools during this process. The first is funding for smaller, rural districts, and the second is low SRO recruitment.
Not all school districts have been able to afford the kind of badge/clicker technology that Patrick Kelly uses at Blythewood High School. “Our lower-income rural districts simply don't have the local property tax base to fund it. If it's going to be a statewide mandate, which I argue it should be, it should also be a state-funded mandate, so that we can ensure that every kid has that additional layer of protection, regardless of where they live in the state.” Kelly said that the members of the House and Rep. Shannon Erickson, the Chairman of the House Education and Public Works Committee, have acknowledged a need for state funding to ensure that all school districts have the capacity to fund and implement the same types of technologies that larger districts, like Charleston and Greenville, already have in place. “I expect that that will be part of the conversation with the budget process in 2026.”
Other security measures have been taken in school districts across the state, including locking doors, installing metal detectors, and hiring security staff. And in May of this year, Gov. Henry McMaster signed a bill permitting public school districts with more than 15,000 students to use armed private security personnel on school campuses.
“I think the thing that's gotten the most public attention, at least over the last month, has been the General Assembly's completion of the governor's long-standing goal to have funding to pay for an SRO, a school resource officer, on every school campus in this state,” Kelly said. “We opened this year, according to the governor's office, just at 100 SROs short. But that's not because the money's not available. It's because local law enforcement offices, just like almost every public service office across every sector in the state, are struggling to find applicants for job vacancies. We have the funding for an SRO in every school, but right now, the pool of applicants is smaller than the need. So, we've got to find additional ways to recruit that talent and get it into our schools.”
