Some Madison County schools have not yet submitted floor plans for digital mapping
By Randy Pierce • As part of his most recent update report concerning a project to digitally map floor plans for schools in Madison County, 9-1-1 Coordinator Arron Weber has shared that there remains a few potential participants missing from this effort.
The project allows first responders who are summoned for emergency situations to become familiar with the various components located within each building or property.
This process was described by Weber as putting those “floor plans from all 120 schools within Madison County into the 9-1-1 system, into the call-handling equipment as well as putting that in the hands of police, fire, EMS, the coroner’s office, EMA (emergency management agency), who needs these in the event of an emergency” but still lacks the necessary information from about 10 schools that have either not responded to requests for it or they are in the process of working on getting it submitted.
The floor plan images have been converted into digital formats, he explained, and many local police and fire department personnel have used this information to conduct “walk-throughs” of the schools to ensure that the rooms and other internal components are actually as described on what had been received, adding for clarification the hypothetical example, “that room 123 is exactly what 123 is and they didn’t turn it into a cafeteria and we didn’t know about it.
“We said that the information is only as good as the eyes that saw it,” Weber noted in sharing this update with the county board public safety committee earlier this month. “We didn’t want to put incorrect information into the system, so we are making headway with that.”
Not specifically identifying which schools have yet to complete and turn in their plans, Weber commented that, “This is a very slow and arduous process because of the fact that there’s a lot of detail involved in these floor plans and we want to make sure we do it right the first time. We’ve got a few parochial schools that we’re going to reach out to one more time,” Weber continued. “When I informed the ETSB (Madison County Emergency Telephone System Board) of this, I kind of used the adage, you know, ‘You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink.’”
He further stressed that submitting the school floor plans “is not something that we’re forcing anybody to do but the benefits far outweigh any cost and, there again, the cost is not to them, I mean, it’s fully funded.”
What is providing financial support for this project, he said, is a “Next Generation 9-1-1 Grant” provided by the Illinois State Police division which concerns itself with emergency response calls. There is no expense for this whatsoever being incurred by the county or its emergency response fund.
In regard to this project, which was initiated in 2024, one of the public safety committee members, Chrissy Wiley of Bethalto, seeking clarification, asked Weber, “You are meaning if someone in a school, in one of the 120 schools, calls 9-1-1, it’ll pull up a map of that school for a dispatcher or deputies and if they say there’s an accident in room 25, you can pull it out, like a school shooting?”
Responding affirmatively, Weber said this process “will let us know where doors, windows, emergency exits are. Some schools have chosen to put AED (automated external defibrillator) locations or their fire extinguisher locations, emergency power and water shells.”
When asked who was responsible for providing these details, Weber said e-mails have been sent to school superintendents, principals, buildings and grounds people, “anyone that we can get a hold of to get us this information.”
“Seems like a no-brainer,” Wiley reacted to Weber’s presentation of this information, with him adding, “We’re really surprised that (Illinois) 9-1-1 made this an allowable expense. That’s why we took advantage of it.”
Weber additionally mentioned that his department involved in this undertaking had a meeting scheduled on July 7 with representatives from Western Illinois University in Macomb who are playing a lead role in getting all of this done.
As other examples of the types of things that need to be included on the maps, Weber had previously mentioned the location or office of a campus officer or perhaps, “They may have a gun locker someplace in that school, that we need to know where that’s at, but the general public doesn’t need to know, fire extinguishers, camera systems, stuff like that.”
WIU’s team of people providing support to this effort has primarily been attentive to converting the information received into digital images that will be incorporated into a local computer-aided dispatching system and the county’s 9-1-1 network.
An initial grant, according to information shared by Weber in the past, covered 20 schools, then the remaining financial support from the same source was approved so that all schools in Madison County can be included in this plan.
Administered in conjunction with the efforts of a nationwide organization called the Critical Response Group, with an endorsement from the Illinois Association of Chiefs of Police, this project is designed to provide law enforcement personnel and emergency first responders with accurate information to help improve response time, curtail tragic outcomes, if possible, and navigate the appropriate scenes effectively.
The individual school maps are to be oriented with north to the top, verifiable for accuracy during any walk-throughs, while showing the different classrooms, storage and office areas, gymnasiums, restrooms, stairwells, potential hazards, utilities, key boxes and automated doors plus the location of trauma kits and other interior components along with athletic fields, surrounding roads and streets and neighboring properties.
