How Cascade County Rebuilt School Emergency Response

From 911 Delays to Instant, Countywide Coordination

Across Cascade County, Montana, school safety used to hinge on a single action: someone placing a 911 call. Teachers, administrators, dispatchers, and deputies relied on manual relays, verbal descriptions, and fragmented tools to communicate during high-pressure situations. When minutes mattered most, information was traveling too slowly.

For Sheriff Jesse Slaughter, that gap wasn’t just frustrating, it was dangerous.

When minutes-long delays became the breaking point

Before modernizing, emergency communication followed a predictable but fragile pattern. A teacher recognized a threat, dialed 911, described the situation, waited for dispatch to relay the information, and hoped deputies received enough context to act fast.

Even on routine school days, the friction was obvious. But during a drill last year, the system showed its limits. Staff were unsure who had called 911. Deputies weren’t certain where in the building the alert originated. Administrators were chasing down classroom status with radios and runners. Rumors circulated faster than accurate information.

Slaughter recalls the uncomfortable realization:

“We were getting information slower than the situation was unfolding. Response time is the key.”

The search for a better system

Cascade County needed something fundamentally different that could eliminate the lag between recognizing a threat and notifying the people who needed to act.

The Sheriff’s Office evaluated solutions with a few non-negotiables:

• Law enforcement had to receive alerts instantly

• Every classroom needed to be visible on a map

• Teachers required a simple way to check in during lockdowns

• Communication had to live in one place, not five

E3 emerged as the platform that could unify the entire response process, from the first tap of a button to the final after-action review.

What began as a search for a faster alerting method quickly turned into a plan to modernize the county’s entire school safety framework.

When human coordination wasn’t enough

Before E3, officers typically received notifications 2.5–5 minutes after an emergency began. That delay was entirely procedural:

• A teacher dialed 911

• Dispatch verified details

• Information was relayed to responding units

• Deputies arrived with limited situational awareness

Floorplans weren’t universally accessible. Room numbers had to be described verbally. And during lockdowns, administrators resorted to radio check-ins—or physically running down hallways—to confirm which rooms were secure.

In Slaughter’s words:

“We were relying on people to communicate perfectly under pressure. That’s not realistic.”

Behind each drill and each call was the same truth: the system depended on humans working around the tools, not with them.

What Cascade County implemented

The countywide rollout of E3 replaced manual workflows with real-time, integrated communication:

• Instant emergency alerts sent directly to deputies, dispatch, and SROs

• Room-level digital maps for every school involved

• Two-way communication channels connecting staff and law enforcement

• Live check-in tools for teachers to indicate safety status

• Systemwide integration with all first responders

• Automated after-action reports following drills and incidents

• Joint trainings for school staff and law enforcement teams

Instead of relying on a sequence of human relays, response became a single, unified workflow.

The turning point: a real incident at Great Falls High

The difference became undeniable during an on-campus safety incident at Great Falls High School. The alert went out instantly—deputies received it in under two seconds, along with the exact room where the issue originated. By the time officers were en route, the school had already initiated its lockdown procedures without hesitation or confusion.

As deputies arrived, the digital floor plan of the school was already updating, giving them a clear path into the building and a precise understanding of where to focus. Inside, teachers marked themselves and their students safe or requested help, creating a live, evolving picture of the building’s status.

What once took long minutes of relay and guesswork unfolded in a coordinated rhythm. The entire building was swept and secured in roughly ten minutes, supported by clarity at every step.

For Undersheriff Lance Boyd, the clarity was striking:

“It gave us exactly the level of coordination we’d been trying to achieve.”

What once took multiple calls, repeated clarification, and guesswork was now a synchronized response guided by real-time information.

The results

The shift in Cascade County was immediate and unmistakable. Alerts that once took minutes now reached deputies in under two seconds, giving law enforcement a head start that simply wasn’t possible before. Officers arrived with room-level detail already in hand, transforming what used to be a blind approach into a targeted, confident response. Inside the building, teachers checked in within moments, giving command staff a full operational picture without radios or runners.

Drills that once felt procedural suddenly became meaningful. Administrators, deputies, and teachers were working from a shared source of truth, and the realism of those exercises began reshaping how the entire county thought about preparedness. Parents and staff noticed the shift too—clarity replaced uncertainty, and confidence replaced speculation.

Most importantly, the system proved itself when it mattered. During the Great Falls High School incident, a building that had historically taken long minutes to coordinate was secured in about ten. What had once been a fragmented, manual workflow became a fast, synchronized response supported by real-time information at every step.

The county didn’t just get faster—it got decisively more prepared.