Home > Featured > How Iowa Built a Statewide School Safety Mapping Program
FacebookLinkedInXPinterestEmail
Dark Mode

How Iowa Built a Statewide School Safety Mapping Program

What does it take to protect every student, teacher, and staff member across an entire state? In Iowa, it started with a shared vision and the right partnerships to bring it to life.

Through collaboration between state leaders, local school districts, GeoComm, and technology partner Esri, Iowa launched a first-of-its-kind statewide school safety mapping program. Together, they created consistent, responder-ready indoor maps for more than 1,400 schools, giving first responders critical location information when every second counts.

This short video highlights how Iowa’s coordinated approach is strengthening emergency response, improving situational awareness, and building confidence for educators, students, and the communities they serve.

Watch the video to learn how Iowa turned a statewide vision for school safety into a reality—and what other states can learn from their approach.

Learn more about GeoComm and Iowa.

See GeoComm School Safety maps.

April 01, 2026

GIS Resources

AI-Powered Target Location: Finding the Place Responders Actually Need to Go

By Tracy “Mac” McElvaney, Chief Product & Innovation Officer, GeoComm  Public safety has made significant progress in improving emergency caller location, but locating the caller is not always the same as identifying where responders actually need to go. In many incidents, those two places are different. A caller may be outside a building while the...

Map Conversion Is a Workflow Problem, Not a GIS Problem

By Tracy “Mac” McElvaney, Chief Product & Innovation Officer, GeoComm  Public safety agencies depend on GIS data every day, but a surprising amount of the work required to make that data useful still happens manually. Data may need to be reformatted, restructured, validated, normalized, or converted before another system can use it. In many organizations,...

Best School Safety Mapping Solutions: What to Compare in 2026

Choosing the right school safety mapping solution means looking beyond the map itself. The best solutions provide accurate, responder ready information that helps schools, universities, 9-1-1 centers, and emergency responders understand a location, share critical details, and coordinate during an incident. For school districts evaluating critical incident mapping companies in 2026, the most important considerations...