The school workspace
Emergencies and safety modes
The two highest-stakes screens in the workspace — the broadcast that reaches every parent at once, and the safety mode that changes what your gate will allow.
Two items sit together in the Daily part of your menu, and they are not the same tool. Emergency sends words. Safety mode changes what the building is allowed to do. Know which you need before you need either. Both are administrator-only: an officer or a class teacher can see the state the school is in, but neither can start it or end it.
Emergency: telling every parent at once
The screen is headed Emergency broadcast and says what it does in one line: it sends to every available channel for all active guardians at this school, after a second typed confirmation.
Chips underneath name the channels this school actually has — Push notifications and Email always, WhatsApp only if it is switched on. An emergency goes out on all of them at once, ignoring quiet hours, parents’ preferences and the switches that govern routine notices. Those controls exist so routine traffic can be tuned down, and this is the one message that must never be tuned down with it.
You type the message — up to 500 characters, counted as you go — and press Create confirmation step. Nothing has been sent. A second panel opens showing a phrase you have to type back exactly before the Queue emergency broadcast button will do anything, and the draft expires five minutes after you created it.
That is the whole guard, and it is a choice: the typing and the short expiry stop an accidental press without slowing down somebody who means it.
Your school activity log records two separate things — opening the confirmation step as a draft, and the send on its own, so a draft left to expire never reads later as an emergency that went out. View broadcast audit opens that record.
What this screen does not do matters as much. It does not lock a gate, stop anyone leaving, or change the school’s safety state.
How many broadcasts you have this month
Above the message box there is a line telling you how many emergency broadcasts you have left this month. Two are covered by your school’s fee, counted per calendar month, and the count is deliberately shown before you start typing rather than after you send — you should meet this number on a quiet day, not halfway through an incident.
Two is a real limit, not a warning. Once you have used both, a third broadcast is refused: the screen tells you the month is spent and the send does not go out. That is a hard edge and it is worth knowing about in advance, which is exactly why the count sits where it does.
Getting a third is quick, and it costs nothing. Your MySentinel operator can extend the month’s allowance for your school, and the refusal on screen names them and gives you the address to reach them on. The extension takes them one action; once it is recorded, the message you already typed sends without you retyping it. If you are dealing with a genuine third emergency in one month, call — that is what the extension is for, and nobody will ask you to justify it.
One thing works the other way round, on purpose. If the system cannot check your count for any reason, it sends the broadcast rather than refusing it. A limit on how many messages you may send should never be the reason a real emergency does not reach a parent.
Safety mode: changing what the gate allows
The Safety mode screen carries the sentence that separates its tools: drills are timed practice mode, and lockdown stays active until an administrator clears it. The current state is a chip at the top — NORMAL in green, DRILL IN PROGRESS in amber, LOCKDOWN ACTIVE in red — with who started it, when, the reason given, and a drill’s scheduled end. Once a school is not normal, that banner sits at the top of every screen every member of staff opens.
Run a drill takes a reason and a duration in minutes, and needs you to type
DRILL. A drill ends itself when its time is up.
Initiate lockdown takes a reason and needs you to type the word LOCKDOWN. It never ends by itself — a lockdown on a timer would quietly reopen a school that is still not safe.
Clear safety mode takes optional notes and needs you to type CLEAR.
All three ask for your passkey, checked on the school’s servers rather than trusted from the device. If you have not registered one, the screen says so and offers the link — do that on a calm Tuesday, not during an incident.
What a lockdown actually stops
A lockdown stops learners being released. An officer who scans a badge sees The school is in lockdown. No learner may leave., with the explanation that scans are blocked, an administrator can override with a reason, and nothing was recorded.
The phone holds that state rather than asking for it each time, so it works through a dead signal and survives a reboot. A device out of touch too long says when safety was last confirmed and keeps scanning, rather than pretending to know.
A drill blocks nothing — it rehearses an evacuation, and freezing the gate during one would teach staff a habit you do not want. While a lockdown is on, the automatic end-of-day sweeps stand down.
One exception exists. An administrator at the gate can release a single learner during a lockdown by writing a reason and confirming with their passkey. Override the lockdown? warns that this checks the learner out while the school is locked down, that it is recorded against your name, and that guardians are notified. It needs a live connection, because an override that queued up quietly would bypass the check that makes it safe.
What families and staff are told
Starting a lockdown, clearing it, and starting a drill each send their own message to every guardian, on every channel the school has — including SMS where it is switched on, since a family whose only contact is a text message is exactly the family that must not miss this one.
The wording is written to be acted on. A lockdown tells parents to stay where they are, not to come to the school, and that staff will contact them when it is safe. A drill says in as many words that it is practice and no action is needed. Staff get an alert of their own that opens this screen.
Drills, and proving you ran them
The lower half of the screen is the record rather than the moment. Drill cadence sets how many drills you must run each term and which kinds count — Evacuation, Lockdown, Fire and Shelter — with an optional reminder before term-end if you are short. Drills this term lists what was run, badged On track or Behind, and Compliance report produces a termly PDF for the department or your insurer. Cadence is a setting, not a live safety action, so it saves without a passkey.