Frisco Was Asked to Buy $350,000 of Floor Plans. It Built Something Else Instead.

In 2008, Frisco ISD was about to spend $350,000 on school floor plans.

The plan was reasonable enough for its time. The district would buy the floor plan data and hand it to the city on CDs, so that firefighters and police responding to a school emergency would have something to look at. The contract was pending before the FISD board.

Then Fire Chief Mack Borchardt asked the board to hold off.

What he objected to

Not the price. Two other things.

The first was training. If responders had a special set of materials and a special procedure for schools, then school incidents would be handled differently from every other call they ran. Borchardt wanted the response to a school emergency to look as much as possible like the response to anything else, so that nobody needed one-off training to be ready.

The second was decay. Discs would have to be produced for every fire apparatus and every police vehicle in the city, then replaced every time a building changed. His judgment was that the effort would be laborious, administratively heavy, and therefore unlikely to stay current.

He had worked with the city's IT department for years and believed they could build something on the geographic information systems the city already ran. The board delayed. In January 2008 the two organisations began scoping the problem, and the work became an interlocal agreement between the district and the city.

What they built

SAFER, for Situational Awareness For Emergency Response.

A responder can pull up a school from a squad car or a fire truck and see geo-referenced floor plans marked with room numbers, the nurse's office, the administration office, roof access, where hazardous chemicals are stored, and where special-needs students are located. Current contact details for school administrators sit alongside it.

So do live feeds from the building's cameras, of which the city counted more than 1,500 at the time.

The point is the timing. Responders can begin planning the approach while still driving.

Before it existed, the city says this information was mostly on paper, only some vehicles had room to carry the files, and there was no reliable way for the agencies to tell each other when something changed.

The part worth noticing

A decade on, the city did something unusual: it replaced its own vendor.

GeoComm software had been the foundation of the platform and was meeting its functional requirements. But the fire and police departments reported that users found it insufficiently responsive, and in a tool where seconds matter, being slow is a defect regardless of the feature list. City IT staff wrote a replacement in-house, two web applications and a vehicle location app.

That is the same instinct as 2008, applied to their own earlier decision.

The external verdict has been consistent. SAFER has taken awards from ESRI in 2010 and again in 2023, a Smart Cities Smart50 award in 2022, a Police Chief's Award in 2023 and the URISA enterprise system award in 2024. Fourteen years apart, judged by people with no stake in Frisco.

The question the page does not answer

A system that streams live video from school hallways and marks where special-needs children are is a serious capability, and its value in an emergency is obvious.

The city's page does not say who can open one of those feeds, under what circumstances, or whether access is logged. Nothing suggests the access is loose. But a tool this powerful usually has rules attached, and those rules are ordinarily as interesting to residents as the technology itself.

It is a fair question to put to the departments that run it, and one this site intends to ask.

Sources

https://www.friscotexas.gov/1080/SAFER