WHO: Headquartered in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., Broward County Public Schools is the sixth largest school district in the United States, serving the educational needs of approximately 260,000 students and employing nearly 37,000 instructional and support staff.

CHALLENGE: Every year many school districts are threatened by severe weather, putting student and faculty lives in jeopardy. Broward County is certainly no exception to Florida's repeat threats of hurricanes, torrential downpours, and high winds during the summer and fall. "Everybody knows we've had problems with wildfires in the Everglades. We also get tornados and we're number one [in the country] for lightning strikes," said Jerry Graziose, director of safety for the Broward County Public Schools. There are 10 deaths and 40 injuries in the county resulting from lightning strikes each year, half of which occur during recreational activities, he says.

Without an appropriate weather alert system in place to protect students during outdoor activities, school administrators were concerned about liability for injuries or deaths associated with severe weather. There was no established protocol for severe weather situations, leaving athletic directors, coaches, band and ROTC directors, and physical education teachers unable to make informed decisions in the event of hazardous weather.

SOLUTION: Broward County schools turned to WeatherBug Professional and Sprint to develop a system that would help give school personnel immediate, precise and relevant weather conditions. In August 2006, they became the first school district in the nation to implement WeatherBug Protect, a real-time, location-based, wireless weather alert system. Alert preferences can be customized to warn of weather events such as high wind gusts, heavy rainfall and various heat index temperatures.

As thunderstorms move across the south Florida region toward Broward County, they cross one or more of the area's 60 WeatherBug tracking stations, nearly half of which are located atop neighborhood schools. The heavy winds, lightning, and/or rainfall trigger an alert that is delivered to the WeatherBug Geographic Information Systems-based software. WeatherBug meteorologists screen pending alerts around the clock and manually approve or cancel them as necessary. Once approved, the alert is automatically delivered as a text message to key personnel in the affected area. Staff members carry a robust, military-specification Sprint GPS-enabled handset equipped with the WeatherBug Protect application. The system also incorporates data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association and the United States Precision Lightning Network and official warnings from the National Weather Service (NWS).

More than 900 WeatherBug-equipped phones have been deployed in 283 schools throughout the county at a cost of $6 per user per month for the service. "All the sports coaches carry these phones, as well as band and ROTC directors, and even teachers take them on field trips. As requests are made from other departments, we provide more phones," said Graziose.

RESULTS: Innovative technology from WeatherBug and Sprint has effectively kept students out of harm's way when erratic weather approaches the region. In one instance, a marching band was at a remote location when Graziose was notified via his Sprint phone that there was a tornado warning for the area. He was able to make an informed decision to keep the students off of the roads until the warning was lifted. Says Graziose, "I picked the WeatherBug service because real people are looking at the weather--I'm not worried about the false alarms; I'm worried about no alarms-- The best part of this service is that it is available anywhere, and if there is a weather alert, [we'll] get it immediately."

Graziose notes that there was some initial resistance from staff to the WeatherBug implementation. Athletic directors are a tough group, he says, and were worried that the weather-alert system would infringe on their games and practices. "I told them, 'I just want to let you know that the NFL has [started using] WeatherBug.' Now I get a lot more cooperation from the coaches."

Since Broward County's implementation of the weather-alerting system, Loudoun County Public Schools in Virginia, Jefferson Parrish Public Schools in Louisiana, and fire departments, emergency management service agencies and the Department of Homeland Security have also decided to use the system.