The newly developed “Share 911” emergency alert app is promising to offer additional protection for youth attending the Manteca Boys & Girls Club.
Retired Manteca Police community service officer Rex Osborn, who operates California Safe Schools, brought the developer of Share911, Erik Endress of New Jersey, to the Manteca Boys & Girls Club Tuesday morning for a demonstration of the alert system app offering it to the club’s chairman of the Safety Committee Charlie Halford.
The Share911 will be on line within the next few weeks with all 10 staffers at the Manteca facility having the app on their cell phones should they need to report any type of emergency including a major disturbance.  It provides instant communication with police and other first responders as well as between staff in the building who have the app on their phones. 
The cost to the Manteca Boys & Girls Club is being covered by an anonymous donor.
The system is already in operation in Alameda County Schools and the City of Hayward schools to protect students.
Halford, a former Manteca police chief, said the app is a browser-based system.  In a school situation with a possible lockdown occurring, he explained that administrators or police could have a follow-up alert to tell all teachers and staff the degree of the emergency.  The students in turn could be advised by their teachers of what to expect in the length of a lockdown or dangers facing them using their own phones to call their parents.
“Every staffer will get a text message, email on their desk computers and on their cell phones as well along with a printout,” he said.  The entire screen will go orange with the alert of a lockdown or a medical emergency adding that communications have always been a problem on the scene in getting updated accounts out during a search operation or other emergency.” 
“It’s a new kind of solution focused on improving the outcome of any emergency,” Halford noted.
In the case of a child who is missing from the Boys and Girls Club or from some subscriber school, staffers or police using the system can alert each other to new information as well as announcing to others connected to the app when a youngster has been found safe.
A Southern California firm has some 7,000 employees and is making use of the Share911 alert communications system to protect their work force.
“It’s the 21st century way of communicating during an emergency in schools and businesses,” according to its developer Erik Endress.  “It’s the best chance of saving lives by empowering all your employees and alerting everyone.”
The cost involved is $3 per employee monthly for schools or businesses from one to 999 employees. Larger corporations with 5,000 plus employees the cost drops to $2 a month per employee.
Endress and Osborn also met with the administrators of the Valley CAPS operation Tuesday that has three different campuses with two in Manteca and one in Modesto on Blue Gum Avenue where the system will be in the testing phase for the next month.
The developer of the system said it is based on saving every possible second between someone seeing danger and everyone else knowing where it is located and just how threatening it might be to both children and staffers.
The 100 percent web-based solution accessible on employees’ computers and mobile devices is said to be the fastest form of mass employee notification available.

To contact Glenn Kahl, email gkahl@mantecabulletin.com.