The Peoria County Regional Office of Education is set to help pay for a “mapping” program at several area schools.
Regional Superintendent of Schools George McKenna says the funding for the program was supposed to come from new state legislation. A change to the School Safety Drill Act was meant to create an application process for schools to get the mapping done. But, McKenna says, the funding for the program was not allocated in the state budget.
The process creates a map of the school similar to Google Maps or other GIS programs.
“It’s an overlay of the school,” said McKenna. “All the classrooms, names of hallways, access to resources. So it might be utility shutoffs, the interior of the building, fire extinguishers, AEDs and crisis kits that are inside the building, in addition to all the exterior door numbers.”
McKenna says these maps are provided to first responders so, in the event of an emergency at the school, they can be efficient and knowledgeable in their response.
One school in the region, Illini Bluffs, served as a pilot for the mapping program. McKenna says, through the process, they learned it costs approximately $4,000 per school.
“We’re very fortunate that we have some extra funds in our office and we allocated some of those funds for GIS mapping,” said McKenna. “It won’t cover, in fact, even a large portion of our county, but we’ll be able to get ourselves in the neighborhood of eight or nine schools.”
McKenna says the use of this funding won’t have a significant impact on the other operations of the office. In fact, he says the office was already prepared to use some of their budget for this purpose.
“Even if the money was allocated in the [state] budget, not every school in our county would get the funds,” McKenna said. “And so we had an opportunity to have funds available for any schools that potentially didn't qualify.”
McKenna wants to stress that programs like these are for prevention.
“There are tens of millions of kids every day that go to school, without any issue. And we want to sort of keep our eye on that.” he said.
You can find the specific legislation here, at the bottom of the bill in Section 50.
