In its recent acquisition of Pikmykid, a company that makes school safety and dismissal software, the emergency management software company Centegix took a step toward addressing that problem for K-12 security systems. In a news release today, Centegix positioned the deal as a way to provide school districts with a single system for managing both routine student movement and emergency response workflows. Rather than focusing solely on emergencies, the companies framed everyday activities — such as student transitions between classes, pickup and dismissal — as part of a broader safety infrastructure.
“School safety doesn’t begin in an emergency — it’s built into every moment of the school day,” Centegix CEO Brent Cobb said in a public statement. “By joining forces with Pikmykid, we’re connecting the operational moments that schools manage every day with the critical response capabilities they rely on when it matters most. From arrival to dismissal, schools will be able to manage student safety through one platform.”
Centegix provides emergency response technology, like wearable panic buttons and campus-mapping tools, to support school staff and first responders. Its system operates on a private network rather than district Wi-Fi, a design choice meant to maintain functionality during outages or cyber incidents. In some states, districts adopted the platform to comply with Alyssa’s Law, which requires schools to implement silent panic alarms to improve emergency response times.
Pikmykid, by contrast, focuses on operational workflows, particularly coordinating the dismissal of students with buses and parents coming to pick them up. Schools use it to manage student tracking and communication, as well as student and family reunification procedures during emergencies.
According to the news release, the acquisition of Pikmykid by Centegix is expected to support functions such as student monitoring during transitions, dismissal coordination, emergency alerting, reunification processes, real-time campus mapping and communication with families and staff. Pikmykid is designed to integrate with existing school systems, such as student information data, security cameras and other operational tools, rather than replace them by aggregating data into a centralized interface — a component district IT leaders think about when deciding which tools to procure.
Pikmykid CEO and co-founder Pat Bhava said in a public statement that the integration is intended to connect routine workflows with crisis-response capabilities in a way that makes it faster and easier for school leaders to communicate important decisions in an emergency.
The acquisition of Pikmykid isn’t the first time Centegix merged with a company that manages school-campus visitors, as it bought Ident-A-Kid in 2023.
