Build a Safer, Connected K-12 School Community with Mitel Revolution

This is the third blog in our education series. The first two blogs focused on how Mitel solutions increase staff productivity and agility and empower teachers to enhance the learning experience. This blog will focus on how the same Mitel solution investment provides a cost-effective, flexible foundation for increasing school safety and strengthening district-wide communities of students, parents, and employees.

In September 2022, US parents’ and students’ concerns about K-12 school safety reached a 20-year high. A Gallup survey showed that 44% of adult participants feared for their children's physical safety at school, while 20% said their children have independently articulated concerns about safety.

An instantaneous, coordinated, and facility-wide approach is essential when school safety is at risk — whether the source is an intruder, extreme weather, or other unexpected events. Seconds count. Communications and digital facility solutions offer the fastest way to keep the entire community safe and informed and comply with all emergency and crisis protocols.

How Mitel Revolution Revolutionizes Communications and Response

Mitel Revolution is designed for today’s modern, mobile-centric world and redefines the standard of mass notifications. Leveraging the Mitel MiVoice Business communications foundation, Mitel Revolution provides a total communications solution that speeds crisis response and keeps everyone connected.

Enabling Enhanced Crisis Response

In an emergency, your district needs a fast, effective, and reliable way to notify the right people to keep others safe. Mitel Revolution ensures you respond quickly to crises with rapid activation and reliable notification — ensuring alerts are delivered to school personnel and the extended school community within seconds. Mitel Revolution enables reliable communications across various channels and devices so everyone can be kept informed and connected during emergency situations, regardless of location.

Communicating with a Wide Range of Devices on a Large Scale

Districts can broadcast notifications across various devices, including desktop PCs and phones, mobile phones, paging systems, SMS text, and email to reach the widest possible audience. Mitel Revolution supports large-scale notification requirements — extending beyond 22,000 endpoints.

Empowering Mobile Staff

With Mitel Revolution, districts can manage communications at any time or from anywhere with the mobile app. Alerts provide geographic details to help with dispatching assistance.

Built on a Reliable, Extendable Architecture

Mitel Revolution’s fault-tolerant, premises-based architecture can be virtualized for a highly reliable, scalable solution.

Compliant with a Range of Emergency and Crisis Protocols

Mitel Revolution complies with regulations such as Kari’s Law & RAY BAUM’s Act, Lockdown Emergency Notification System (LENS), and more. Mitel Revolution also has out-of-the-box integrations with automatic alerts from Emergency Notification Services.

Providing Real-time Reporting and Monitoring

Because safety situations can change rapidly, Mitel Revolution provides administrators with quick, continuous access to system availability and extensive reporting and monitoring tools, so they can take corrective actions if needed.

Adapting to Specific District Requirements

Because a district’s needs may change in the future, Mitel Revolution is designed with adaptability in mind. With out-of-the-box integrations and broad support for multiple devices, the solution can easily be tailored to address changing needs. And Mitel Revolution can be right-sized to fit the requirements of smaller school districts, with a very modest cost of entry.

Always in Touch, Always Informed with Mitel Revolution

School calendars are notoriously busy. They change with the seasons and, often, by the week — with days off, special hours, and events. This can make staying current challenging for everyone in the school community. Districts using Mitel Revolution, however, have another way to help keep everyone informed. Mitel Revolution can also enable any type of timely, mass notification. For instance, districts can use Mitel Revolution to:

• Share special announcements with employees

• Deliver overhead paging for visitors

• Remind students and parents about upcoming events, special calendar items, and recent news

The more informed a school community is, its members are more active. Mitel Revolution provides one more powerful option to strengthen a range of school communities.

One Comprehensive Communications Foundation, Many Deployment Options

No two school districts are alike. Some are large, and others are small. Some operate within large cities, and others connect district schools across rural areas where reliable SIP trunking connectivity isn’t always available. Yet, all K-12 school operations must remain highly available and secure.

That’s why Mitel is committed to providing K-12 school districts with their robust communications platform, their way.

Right-sized for District Operations

MiVoice Business comes in various sizes designed to fit various district requirements. Smaller districts might want to take advantage of Mitel’s launch of a MiVoice Business format specifically designed for smaller organizations.

Flexible Deployment to Ensure Continuous Communications

Some K-12 school districts need reliable, predictable, always-on access to voice-enabled communications. They can’t go offline when their communications vendor schedules a software maintenance outage window at their convenience. Yet, the need to maintain software and prepare for internet outages are realities that districts need to plan for. They can maintain software when schools are closed. And, by deploying communications solutions with local site survivability, they can ensure district staff can still communicate within and outside the school — even if they lose internet access.

For districts that need this level of availability, MiVoice Business provides on-premise deployment options (to go along with its private cloud, public cloud, and hybrid solutions) designed to deliver local site survivability and greater management control.

The Choice to Pay Their Way

Unlike other vendors who only provide subscription payment options, Mitel allows school districts to choose from the subscription or perpetual license payment options — whichever method helps them stretch their budget further.

Enhance Safety and Peace of Mind While Building Community Connections

At the outset of this series, we outlined how the pandemics’ disruption to school operations and learning processes caused ‘cracks in the foundation’ of school communities worldwide. Now school districts are using Mitel communications and collaboration solutions to repair those cracks and forge a wealth of new communities — large and small — to improve the educational and working experience for all.

Mitel Revolution is the perfect complement to Mitel unified communications and collaboration solutions: it protects school communities and strengthens them. Mitel provides districts with the comprehensive communications portfolio they need to communicate effectively, immediately, and with the highest quality.

Whether a district wants to send real-time, mass communications to keep students and parents informed — to create a supportive, collaborative teaching community — or to facilitate one-on-one communications between staff members, they can leverage Mitel solutions to build the variety of communities they need to ultimately provide an exceptional learning, teaching, and working experience.

Learn more about how Mitel solutions for education can strengthen communities within your district.