Guys, okay you can come on.
My name is Tyler Coles and I am the founder of The Student Dot.
My name is Manuel Vasquez Dickson and I am a co-founder to The Student Dot.
My name is Luis Fonseca and I'm a co-founder of The Dot.
In 2012, Tyler was a freshman in high school.
His high school nearly being 20 minutes from Newtown, Connecticut,
the location of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting.
He was in gym class when it happened.
All I could think about was my little brother because he was in a school that could have been affected
and I just had no way of knowing and that sense of uncertainty and unknowing
and not being able to reach my loved ones.
That was truly frightening.
Manny grew up in the Dominican Republic,
a place where gun violence wasn't really part of the vocabulary.
His family then moved him to Orlando, Florida, and the first thing he learned about American schools was how to hide.
And then all of a sudden I'm in middle school and we're doing drills to practice for when somebody is threatening the school.
We're running into the auditorium.
We're hiding under desks.
It made it seem like all of this could happen any day.
There was a school shooting at my school.
I was thankfully not there that day.
I think the people there were really lucky.
It should never get to that point.
We should be able to prevent it in the first place.
As soon as somebody enters a safe bubble, they should be stopped.
Luis was a sophomore in high school in Florida when the Parkland shooting happened.
He didn't feel it right away, but then he got home and he saw his parents' faces.
I was a sophomore in high school and I was in my classroom.
You know, at the time, I didn't really know what to make of it.
It didn't connect with me on any sort of level until I got home and I saw the reaction from my parents.
They were worried about what was going on.
And it was at that moment that, you know, I started to picture myself in that situation.
And the terror of what they likely faced walking down those halls.
After that event, there's just no longer an assumption of safety.
Now, safety is something that you have to think about.
When there's that level of danger presented to you every day, you become desensitized.
You can only cling on to the thought of, "It didn't happen to me today, so maybe it won't happen to me tomorrow."
And that's no way to live.
So, in order for me to properly test this entire system and then be able to repeat it, I have to put sticky notes everywhere so that I remind myself of the absolute position of those tags.
This is where the tags started.
Our system is meant to not be present.
It's something you put on.
Whenever you put on a watch or whenever you put on a pin on your shirt, five seconds later, you forget you wear it.
Our entire system is supposed to function invisibly to you, to the student, to the staff, to the parents.
The wearable is a unique identifier that plugs you into our security grid.
It is the physical component of our system that helps ensure during the lockdown all students are accounted for.
We will stop you as soon as you even think of getting into our campus.
You are being proactive, not reactive.
Well, best case scenario is that it shouldn't have to change our day to day, right?
They shouldn't have to do anything different.
They can just do their job and live their life.
And best case scenario is they never have to interact with us.
My name is Tara Aretzian.
I am a special ed teacher.
Tara Aretzian has been an educator in Maine for nearly 18 years.
She has run more lockdown drills than she can count.
And this is what it looks like.
A lockdown drill.
Okay.
So the principal will come on Intercom and say we are practicing a lockdown drill.
And so the teachers have to lock the door, shut the lights off.
The students are to go to the designated lockdown area, according to the colors on the floor, which are hidden from all windows accessible from inside the building.
Sometimes it's stressful.
Like coming into school the other day before our drill, I was like, okay, I have to have this conversation.
I think about the group of kids that I have during that period and just like the different dynamics of the students that we have.
On October 25th, 2023, a gunman killed 18 people in Lewiston, Maine, three miles from Tara's school.
It wasn't a school shooting, but the ripples of it affected the community so much that the impact of that event came to school anyway.
The sense was very solemn.
There was a lot of, you know, families that were affected.
A lot of students had families that were affected and there was a lot of hugs.
There was a lot of tears.
Tyler, Luis and Manny told Tara about their technology and what it would mean for her school.
Being from a community already so deeply affected by gun violence, they felt she and the rest of her community would be a prime candidate for the student dot.
I mean, I just think it would help expedite things.
It would help save time.
I think it would help admin understand like, okay, they have so many kids in each classroom.
Even if you have to like grab another kid, they still know where they're at.
And it would help be able to communicate to parents and families that your kid is safe, your kid is here.
Being able to take something that would take 30 minutes to take five minutes is just going to help save a kid's life.
Having that time is going to definitely save lives.
If I was 15 years old again and in a classroom, I wouldn't be having to sit in that gym locker room hearing about the tragedies that just occurred and feeling the fear that that brought.
I would know that I was safe.
I would know that there is something bigger watching out for me.
I am most proud of the fact that I can tell my nieces, my little cousins, that I'm the one working to keep them safe.
It's important that when a parent drops off their kids at school and lets go off their hand, that they know it's safe in ours.