Sugar Land City Hall – Cane Room, November 13, 2025 – The Fort Bend GIS Consortium (FBGISC) welcomed GeoComm as the featured presenter for the 2025 4th Quarter meeting. Represented by Mr. Larry Warner and supporting colleagues, GeoComm introduced members to their School Safety Mapping Solution, a modern, GIS-driven approach to improving situational awareness for public safety and school district partners.

In recent years, Texas has heightened its focus on school safety and emergency preparedness, most notably through House Bill 3 (HB 3), which strengthened requirements for safety planning, communication with first responders, and the maintenance of accurate facility information. GIS plays a central role in meeting these expectations. Up-to-date indoor maps, standardized symbology, evacuation layers, and room-level location awareness directly support the intent of HB 3 by giving emergency personnel the information they need before arriving on scene. Beyond compliance, modern GIS platforms materially improve public safety outcomes by enabling school districts, public safety agencies, and local governments to plan, train, and respond with greater precision. GeoComm’s School Safety Mapping Solution aligns with these needs by integrating building details, safety assets, and emergency protocols into a shared environment that strengthens coordination and improves protections for students, educators, and staff.

GeoComm’s solution combines a web-based map viewer and map data manager, enabling school districts and other facility owners to maintain floor plans, update points of interest, and manage safety-related assets with confidence. While major structural edits remain controlled for accuracy, the system empowers staff to make unlimited day-to-day updates-adding, moving, and renaming features as needed. Built on Esri’s ArcGIS platform, the solution leverages national standards for symbology and data structure, ensuring that maps are consistent, interoperable, and reliable for emergency response.

Feature highlights include support for multi-story facilities, a floor picker, customizable emergency protocol layers (rally points, evacuation routes, hazard areas, and more), PDF export for offline use, and robust user-management tools for handling sensitive information. Of particular interest to members was the platform’s ability to support real-time 911 call visualization, enabling dispatchers and first responders to view indoor locations down to the room level. Additional considerations-such as version control through saved PDFs, controlled data sharing with public safety partners, and secure APIs currently in development-demonstrated GeoComm’s commitment to accuracy and responsible information governance.

GeoComm also addressed several operational and future-facing elements of the solution. Although exporting lists of assets-such as AEDs or fire extinguishers-is not currently a native function, GeoComm can generate those reports upon request. Members also discussed multi-floor connectivity, evacuation routing conventions, floor plan-sharing workflows, and file format considerations during the Q&A.

As a regional consortium of over 16 public entities, FBGISC continues to serve as an established, collaborative resource for local governments evaluating geospatial technologies. While the consortium does not hold purchasing authority, our shared expertise and cross-jurisdictional experience position us to help member organizations-and, by extension, public administrators and elected officials-better understand the feasibility, value, and real-world impact of GIS solutions that safeguard our communities.