By Mark Shaffer
The Ironton Tribune

“It’s a critical need,” said Eric Floyd, the Lawrence County Superintendent, of a new digital radio and repeater system that will be purchased by a $750,000 check.
The new system will be purchased for the 150 or so school buses in Lawrence County’s eight school systems. There will also be hand held radios and base stations at the school. The digital radios will be helped out by repeaters placed strategically around the county to boost the signal and fill in the voids along bus routes where there is regular radios and cell phones can’t get a signal.
Floyd said that when all the superintends met last winter, one of their concerns was the need to upgrade the current communication system.
“We began to brainstorm and figure out how to pay for such a thing. We came up with the idea of requesting the money,” Floyd said.
The Lawrence County Educational Service Center applied for a grant from the Ohio Strategic Community Investment Fund through Ohio House Speaker Jason Stephen’s office and two weeks ago, the ESC got a check for $750,000.
“Schools will now be able to better communicate with the bus drivers when they are on their routes, the drivers will be able to communicate better with each other,” Floyd said. “Now we will be able to have a more reliable, robust infrastructure here in Lawrence County. We want to ensure consistent and safe communication.”
And with the upgrade, the system will link up to EMS and the Lawrence County Sheriff’s Office. The system also includes GPS locating, so if a bus has an accident or an emergency, first responders can quickly and accurately locate the bus even in the most rural of areas in the county.
“There are so many dead spots in the rural areas and the repeaters should enhance the ability to communicate,” Floyd said.
And although no one likes to thinks about such a thing, if there is some type of an emergency that requires a mass evacuation of people, it will be easier to coordinate the buses to get people to safety by agencies all being on the same channel.
“All of our schools were supportive of this as was Sheriff Jeff Lawless, our school resource officers and our EMA directors,” Floyd said.
As to when the system will be up and running, Floyd said the county is doing a study to figure out the best locations for the digital signal repeaters locations and number of repeaters needed around the 456 square miles of Lawrence County.
“Once that is finished up, we will start purchasing repeaters and radios and start the process of getting those installed,” Floyd said, adding the installation will be done one district at a time. “We are working on that schedule now.”