One concern that’s always on the mind of Dallas County Sheriff Chad Leonard is the safety of students at every school building throughout the County.

With that in mind, Leonard came up with the idea for the School Emergency Alert Radio System (SEARS) project, which he believes will improve the overall safety of people at the school and law enforcement officials arriving on the scene. Any school that is dispatched from the Sheriff’s Office will be hooked up to the system, which currently includes 24 local schools. “It’s similar to the radios that we all have in our squad cars, (but) there’s a big red button on it. And if there’s something happening in that school, it would just take that person to hit that red button. It’s like a panic alarm type of thing, (and it) will alert our dispatch center. And then the second part of this would be the dispatch center has the ability to log on to those lobby cameras in each one of those schools and monitor what’s happening until law enforcement arrives on scene.”

Leonard says the SEARS project costs $68,000 for just the radios, but as it’s something he’s personally spearheading, it won’t cost taxpayers anything. It’s already over halfway funded, only needing around $24,000 more, and he encourages businesses that have a vested interest in children’s safety to contribute funds. Once all the money is raised, Leonard will purchase the radios and they should be active shortly after. He adds, Dallas would be only the second county in the United States to utilize this type of radio system, and the first to include cameras.

To hear more about this and other topics related to the Sheriff’s Office, listen to today’s Perry Fareway Let’s Talk Dallas County program on air and at RaccoonValleyRadio.com.