How Middlesex School Eliminated Emergency Response Silos

One Alert, Every Channel

Most independent schools already own capable emergency notification tools. What separates a coordinated response from a slower one usually isn't the tools themselves. It's whether they can talk to each other.

At Middlesex School in Concord, Massachusetts, an alert now works like this. Someone opens Ruvna and sends the message. In that same moment, classroom phones across campus broadcast it as audio, digital signage displays it, and text, email, and app notifications reach the community. One alert, every channel, with no second system to open and no sequence to remember.

What Makes Communication Harder on a Residential Campus?

Middlesex serves roughly 425 students in grades 9 through 12, most of whom live on campus, in a setting thirty to forty minutes outside Boston. At almost any hour, someone might be in a residential dorm, a classroom, or on a playing field at the far edge of campus.

Marc Carter, Chief Innovation Officer, joined Middlesex four years ago after eleven years at an all-boarding school in Virginia. He describes a campus culture built on unlocked doors and long walks in the woods, and a practical reality alongside it. Geography doesn't exempt any school from planning, and a campus this spread out needs communication that travels with people instead of waiting for them at a desk.

The tools Middlesex had when Marc arrived did their jobs well, and he's clear about that. The friction was in the seams between them. Mass communication lived in one place and indoor visual alerts in another, each with its own login, and some required a desktop. In a residential setting, the person who most needs to send an alert is usually walking between buildings. Marc's view is that the ability to write a message and get it out quickly shouldn't belong to the technology office alone.

Why Middlesex Built Around One Platform

Middlesex is now in its second year with Ruvna, and Marc traces the decision to two factors. The first was accountability. For Marc, that meant putting control in the hands of faculty and staff rather than concentrating it in one office. The second was integration. Middlesex runs Veracross, and Marc wanted a platform that would sync cleanly with it and connect to the rest of the tools on campus.

How Does One Alert Reach Every Channel?

Steve Nace joined Middlesex as Systems and Network Administrator in the summer of 2025, bringing more than ten years in education technology. His approach was simple in concept. Treat Ruvna as the single source of truth, then let webhooks carry that information outward automatically.

Here's the architecture. A Ruvna event has started. A webhook sends the message content to InformaCast Fusion, an on-premises server acting as the central distribution hub. From there, InformaCast sends a multicast broadcast to the school's Yealink phones running on Zoom Phones and a Common Alert Protocol notification to ScreenCloud, which drives the campus digital signage. Ruvna's own text, email, and app notifications go out in parallel.

Steve routed everything through a single hub instead of building a separate webhook to each downstream system. That way one InformaCast scenario handles any incoming Ruvna alert, whatever it is. A fire alarm and a lockdown drill arrive through the same path. Today a single webhook configuration covers every scenario Middlesex needs, which is a meaningful thing for a lean technology team to be able to say.

What Took Real Engineering?

The hardest piece of the build is also the most useful detail for other schools.

InformaCast Fusion requires a very specific JSON structure, and Ruvna's payload builder at the time didn't produce it. Steve could have worked around that by creating roughly ten separate InformaCast scenarios, each firing a generic pre-written message. That would have been the easier path, and he turned it down, because it would have defeated the purpose of the design.

What Middlesex wanted was the actual words someone types into Ruvna in the moment, carried through to every screen and speaker on campus. Not a canned announcement that a drill is happening somewhere in a building, but the real message, and the follow-up when there's new information to share. So Steve went to Ruvna's development team, who made a more customizable webhook response possible.

That distinction matters more than it sounds. A pre-recorded alert tells people something is happening. A live alert tells them what's happening and what to do, and it can be updated moments later.

How Classroom Phones Became a Campus PA System

Middlesex doesn't have a traditional indoor PA system. So when the school migrated from older Polycom phones to Yealink devices on Zoom Phones over spring break in March, Marc and Steve saw a chance to build something more useful than a phone system.

They put a phone in every classroom. Steve had converted a previous employer to Zoom Phones and knew the Yealink and Zoom combination supported multicast broadcasting, so the phones could work as their own PA network. The result was better everyday communication across buildings and a real improvement to emergency notification. Faculty and staff are asked to carry their mobile devices, and now there's a phone in every classroom as well, so the message arrives either way.

How Did Middlesex Earn Faculty Buy-In?

Unified systems only help if people use them. Rather than announcing a new system from the technology office, Steve walked the campus building by building, talked with faculty and teaching assistants, and asked what was working before finalizing anything. Ruvna's Community Manager, Rachel Strauss, ran the demo and introduction for faculty and staff.

That matters at independent schools in particular, where technology and operations often rest with one or two people and there's no central department to push a change through from above. Buy-in gets earned in conversation.

It matters for a second reason too. Families paying tuition expect a school to be well run, and a board asking how the community would be reached during an incident deserves a clear answer. A Head of School can explain one platform that faculty use every week. That's an easier story to tell than a stack of tools that each work on their own.

What Changes When the Silos Come Down?

When Marc looks at what's changed, the biggest result isn't a number. It's a mindset. A single trusted platform is one the whole community can practice with, so readiness becomes part of how the school operates instead of an occasional exercise.

The confidence shows outward too. Middlesex recently hosted an operations conference for peer independent school teams and demonstrated its setup for them. The next layer Marc and Steve are exploring is physical security, evaluated against the same standard as the original decision. Open connections that let strong tools work together.

That standard is now the filter for every technology conversation at Middlesex.

"My goal is to remove ourselves from silos, like one product only does one thing. How can this be integrated? How can we make it work with other systems? Those are some of the questions we ask ourselves during our evaluation."
Marc Carter, Chief Innovation Officer, Middlesex School

For schools with spread-out campuses, residential communities, or lean operational teams, the lesson from Middlesex isn't that you need more tools. It's that the tools you already trust are worth a lot more once they can speak to each other.

If you're curious how Marc and Steve got there, the full case study walks through the build in their own words, including the webhook architecture, what they'd tell another school attempting something similar, and where they're taking it next.